Burtson lined up the fin with Alan's figure and squeezed the trigger impulsively. The rifle was surprisingly quiet. The figure turned, startled, as a congregate of broad leaves exploded in the air over his head. "They're here," his son shouted into the microphone. "This is it. I'm not going to make it out of here. They won't leave until I'm taken out. Don't let the recipe die-keep it going. Keep it-"
Burtson fired again, and a third time. The figure jerked backward. "Holy crap," he said. "Holy crap." He wished Toshikazu had stayed; he felt a queer pride click into place somewhere inside, but quickly he thought better of it. Shooting your son: it was a private thing, composed of a sweet, crushing sense of impossibility. You didn't want to share it, in the end.
Burtson dropped the rifle and sat at his desk, where Toshikazu had left a Post-it note with his billing address. He took his cell phone from the top drawer and tried his wife. Somehow, he got a ringtone. A woman answered the phone in another language. "Hello? Marion?" he said, and the voice replied in a fluttery, unrecognizable tongue. Realizing it was a stranger, he whispered, "I just shot my son," feeling each word turn in his dry, dirty mouth like rocks in a tumbler. "I took aim and I shot him. Has that ever happened to you?" The voice erupted again, and then died off sharply. He thought the woman might have hung up. "It's a thing you remember," he said. "It might be the only thing you really remember. You take back what you've given. It goes against-it's a powerful thing, what you've done when you do that." He stopped when he heard the silence of the disconnected call. He wasn't sure if the woman hanging up had hurt him more than the sight of his son slowly folding up into a compact hump on the horizon. He was sure he'd know later, on the plane, speeding ridiculously over a charcoal-dark, midsize, failing industrial hub. When he got farther away from the jungle, he thought, he'd be able to measure the two events, hold them, one in each palm, and divine to himself the thing he felt worst about.
THE HOOK
Shelley Jackson
TRAVIS BROUGHT IN a dog's leg that he said fell out of the sky. One end was ragged and chewed-looking, its bloody bits gone hard and dark. It was still enrobed in short brown fur. I was glad about that. Betsy had been redder. The leg had landed right beside him, cracking a sheet of plywood, and bounced. It could have brained him, I thought, with a familiar wooze of panic. He was laughing, waving it around, touching things with it. "Give paw," he cried, and extended it to me.
Then he hurled it down (I heard the nails click against the floor) and his face caved in. I held out my arms and he buried his head in my stomach. As his jaw worked it felt like he was trying to eat me.
"Come on," I said. "We'll go look at the fire."
He sniffed and choked. "Really?"
THE FIRE WAS kept burning all the time. It was in the fenced-in lot behind the former supermarket, where they used to take in deliveries. The supermarket was used as a morgue, now, and the dead were wheeled out back in shopping carts. At the loading dock they were draped over the hook. The bodies were hoisted and swung into the center, where they were received into the oily smoke. The crane performed a jerky but practiced dance, and the hook returned empty.
The crane was the tallest thing around. It was visible from all over the neighborhood, leaning over the pyre in an attitude of grave attention. We knew, though we could not see him, that the crane operator, too, gave the dead his full attention. We believed this, though we also believed that the crane operator was the crudest sort of person, given to rude jokes about the dead, and never clean. His face and hair were slicked with black grease "from the hinges of death's door," said Loss, with relish, quoting some song. His long skirts were always scabbed with disgustingness. The crane operator was a figure invoked by children during sleepovers to induce giggling and shivers. We trusted him, all the same, and felt there was none better for the job. We would not have trusted our dead to a diplomat. The hook must not be coy or self-conscious. It must have no protocol but need. That was exactly what made it the closest thing we could imagine to holy. That's how I felt, anyway, and I'm sure others felt the same.
The crane and the crane operator were always there, minding the dead. Even if, as he must sometimes do, the crane operator slept at his controls, he was still presiding, and we believed that even his dreams concerned the dead.
I WRAPPED THE dog's leg in plastic and threw it away, but it turned out that Travis kept it. I saw him playing with it, using it like a golf club. Well, let him. He has few enough toys.
Travis had taken to wearing a gigantic coat he'd found. It puddled around his feet. To walk without tripping, he had to take wide strides, punting the skirts forward at each step. So when he steps his legs apart and hunches over, adjusting his grip on the dog's leg, his sleeves almost touch the ground. He straightens, letting the dog's leg lean against his legs, and rolls them up into two big donuts around his arms. Then he resumes his pose. He taps the dog's foot lightly on the ground, then swings.
Something thwacks into Loss's shack, a dome of filthy rugs draped over a hutch, and a gentleman staggers out, laughing, and looks around. Loss pokes her head out after, laughing too. Her nose is bleeding, but she doesn't seem to notice.
Travis gives the gentleman a Nazi salute with the dog's leg.
I SAID THEY were always there, but actually there were times when nobody knew why-the crane left its post to rove through the city. When we saw that black arm raised above our shacks, our nerves trilled, but whether in fear or welcome we didn't know. If we dreaded the sight of the crane, why did we strain so hard to make out the silhouette of the operator in his cab?
The operator and the hook often appear merged in our dreams, as a familiar stranger with one deformed hand, or a page of type on which one word is misspelled.
FROM Loss's HUT comes a scream: "Oh-Oh-Oh!" Travis looks at me apprehensively, but when I don't react, he goes back to playing. When we go out later we see Loss outside her hut, upending bottles on wires stuck in the ground, to dry. Travis stops in his tracks, looking at her, then starts running around like crazy.
Next time we hear Loss scream, Travis says, "What's Loss doing?"
"Fucking," I say. Why not tell him? He will be fucking someone himself before long. I can't say I like the idea, but it's so. But then I regret saying it, because he looks so miserable. Did he really not know what Loss was doing? Or did he hope that I didn't know? I wonder what "fucking" means to him. Should I explain it? Or will that just make things worse?
I'M NOT Loss, but I get lonely too. One night, I went to the hook. On the embankment above the lot, I found a slit in the fence, one of several I knew of. Nobody bothered to repair them: the fire did not need protecting, though the gate was kept locked all the same. On the other side, I banged my ankle on what my fingers informed me was a jutting slab of asphalt rubble. "Hook," I ejaculated, and proceeded at a stoop, waving my hands gently before me. I descended a creaking slope of corrugated fiberglass roofing on my butt. Rising, I booted something light that my hands had missed, and heard it boing off into the blackness, and almost saw it, a pale bounding form, probably a plastic jug. Then the ground leveled out to a gritty pavement, glinting with tiny fires. Finally I looked at the fire directly, and stopped. I couldn't go on; the fire was so bright, I couldn't see anything else. I was like a dark planet, suspended in groundless blackness, in eternal contemplation of a sun.
The fire was emitting a continuous throaty groan. Skeins of dark vapors unspooled from a thousand sources in the mound and swirled in the middle air, gathering themselves only reluctantly into the larger body of smoke that rose, leaning slightly, from the fire. Underlit with orange, it seemed an almost solid body, a never-ending turd of giant proportions. Where the light gave out, though, beyond the huge, hieratic shape of the hook and the faintly outlined geometry of the crane's arm, it disappeared into the night sky whose blackness elsewhere seemed transparent. It seemed that the night was all smoke, that this was how night was made.
Eyes a little accustomed to the darkness again, I looked d
own. A silhouetted dog, invisible before-or maybe simply not there; startled by my approach, she had just now returned to her post-was pacing back and forth in front of the blaze, long teats swinging despite her thinness, skinny tail clinging to her flanks, as if protecting her from a blow so long anticipated that reflex had become habit. Sometimes she stopped with paw raised, considering something at the very edge of the fire, then shied, eyes kindling as she wheeled.
I took a few steps. As I approached she got agitated, looking back and forth between me and the fire, her forelegs high-stepping. Finally she pawed at the fire, letting out an almost simultaneous yelp. Something at which I didn't want to look too closely rolled a little way out of the flames. Hunching, she closed her jaw on it, released it, shaking her jowls, rolled her eyes at me, then clamped her jaw on it, and cantered with it, whining softly, into the shadows under the crane.
I followed slowly. I did not want to seem like I was chasing her, laying a rival claim to her treat. I felt for her, and anyway, she looked hungry enough to fight me for it.
The shadow of the crane made a black pool in which I could barely make out the step up to the cab. I saw the dog's illumined eyes, farther under. They watched me steadily. "Betsy?" I said experimentally. The two lights burned clear.
I felt for the handhold I knew was there and swung myself up onto the step. I tapped on the door, but it was already opening. The crane operator welcomed me wordlessly, as if he had expected me. There was a strong smell in the cab, smoky, meaty. I shuddered and forced myself to breathe freely. The crane operator opened his stinking coat and took me under it, and we went down, awkwardly, to the floor. His body was surprisingly smooth and hot. I thought of Travis, the only body I ever touched now, though less and less often these days.
Even inside the cab, I could feel the heat of the fire. The roof was redly aglow. Light crazed the smeary windshield. Finally, I was warm.
OUR CONGRESS WAS satisfactory, save for one moment, when a sudden chill on my slobbered pussy made me open my eyes. He had lifted his head, the cables of his neck ashine. I looked at him with surprise. I had forgotten he had a face. "What's your name?" he said.
I thought a minute. "Rose," I said.
His face began to have the businesslike expression of a man who is introducing himself. I heaved up my hips to confront his mouth with what he had forsaken, at which his eyes crossed. Then, perceiving that was not enough, I heaved up my knees and clamped my thighs on his head, so that he fell forward with a surprised huff into my pubic hair, where whatever he might have told me became hot air. He went back to his good work and I lazed my eyes up to the corrugated roof and then closed them again, thinking I did not want to know his name, or whether I might have known him before he became the crane operator. I wanted the crane operator, that's all.
IT WAS NOT yet even close to dawn, but a bluer light began to fill the cabin. Through the windshield I could just make out what had been invisible at night, the smoke. Actually, when I looked at it directly, I could not see it, but when I looked away there it was, black against the blue. I lay and watched it become visible as the sky paled. It rose straight up through the windless air.
The crane operator was a silent hot weight on my shoulder. I drew my arm slowly out from under him. He didn't wake. I sat up and looked at him, pulling the end of his coat over my knees. I was afraid I might see something disgusting, in the cool light, a scab at the hairline, or something gummy stuck in his hair, but there was nothing like that. He looked peaceful. I got dressed and climbed over him to get out. The cab door cawed and cool smoky air flowed in, but he didn't wake up, so I just left. I didn't see the dog.
My feet seemed very loud as I crunched and rattled through the rubble past slumbering huts. A lone dog woofed once.
I lifted the flap of our hut and came into the sweet smell of Travis sleeping.
A DEAD MAN and woman are draped together over the hook. As first the woman, then the man, is draped over the hook, I feel the cab adjust slightly to their weight; slight as it is, it changes the balance of the whole system, as my presence in the cab must also. The crane operator throws a lever, shifts into reverse. The cab bucks. Despite the operator's violent movements, the grinding of gears, and the lurching of the cab, the movements of the hook itself are smooth and languorous, all abrupt movements damped by the long, heavy cable. The crane operator seems to know where the hook is without looking, as if it were part of his own body.
The couple rise, swinging in a smooth arc over the pyre, where the smoke conceals them. He brakes before they are quite over the pyre, lets the momentum of the crane, the hook, its burden carry them into the smoke. They are engulfed, but a moment later reappear below the smoke, descending through the silvery miasma of the incandescent air. They are sheeny, quicksilver.
Her dress is on fire. One minute it wasn't, the next, she is burning. Her hair is a torch. His too. I don't want to watch anymore.
I look at the operator. He is absorbed. The cab settles as the hook lowers some of its weight onto the pyre. He jiggles two levers at once, his face unreadable. Then, though I detected no change, he throws one back, and the hook soars free.
"My name isn't Rose," I said. "It's Rebecca."
I NO LONGER dream about the crane operator. Not, in any case, the way I did, as a shepherd of souls, or Virgil, or Charon. I dream about Zachary Holle.
I WAS EATING some meat Travis got in trade for a book he'd foraged-he's a good provider, already-and I bit down hard on a bone. Something crunched inside my jaw and I tasted blood and found one of my teeth alongside my tongue. I did not tell Zachary, who might have worried that I was sick, since that's one of the signs, though I was sure that this time it was just an accident. I spit it out into my hand and put it in my pocket. Later I washed it and considered. I wanted to give it to Zachary. I wanted to give it to Travis, too. Finally I gave it to Travis. The sickness didn't even seem to cross his mind. He immediately went and found a little bag somewhere, to put my tooth in, and hung it around his neck.
When I see how happy he is about it I feel guilty that I even considered giving it to Zachary.
ONE MORNING COMING home I see some early riser sitting outside her house. I consider taking a detour around her, but decide against it. There is no rule against fucking the crane operator, though nobody, to my knowledge, has ever done it. But maybe everyone has done it, keeping it a secret. Someday I will ask Zachary. Or not.
She is leaning back against a great, tilted slab of reinforced concrete from which the metal writhed stilly against the flamingo light. She stares at me as I pass and I lift my hand to her. Then it occurs to me that she might be dead, which makes my waving hand feel strange. Well, it's someone else's concern if she is.
When I push the rug aside, I see Travis is not in his bed. Right away I begin hurrying around the hut, pushing on the carpets hung on the walls as if he were likely to be standing behind one, waiting for me, for hours maybe. "Where are you Travis, where are you," I chant.
Guilty for what?
Well.
I leave and walk quickly around the neighborhood. My neighbors look at me pass and I consider asking if they have seen Travis but I decide not to. I go as far as the embankment over the fire. I already know Travis is not here, though it used to be his favorite place to go. I see Zachary shoving at something in the fire with a charred push broom, its bristles burned off. He does not see me. It is strange to look at him from this distance again; it's the view I had of him when he was a stranger, so now, for a moment, he seems like a stranger again and I think of the two rosettes of hair around his soft nipples and am shocked.
I hurry back. The woman is no longer leaning on her slab. Either someone came with a cart or she was alive all along and I have a reputation. I don't care. I am happy thinking Travis will be home now. More and more he will disappear on some boy business and I will have to let him.
But he is not there.
I try to make some gruel but I keep forgetting to stir it, so it h
ardens into a great fist on the end of the spoon. I gnaw at it a little but it's foul burned on the outside, grainy and gummy inside. So I sit down outside our hut and just wait. I look back and forth, first toward the huts of my neighbors and the smoke and the black arm of the crane, then toward downtown where we don't go.
It is midday when I see him coming out of Loss's hut. I stand up. As he comes up the tilted slab of flooring between our huts I stretch out my hand to him. He springs up without my help, but then, since I don't withdraw my hand, he stops and reluctantly extends a bulky arm, shaking back the cuff. Even so I have to root around inside it for his hand.
I feel something cold and bristly.
"Hook!" I let go and push back the sleeve. The smell of dishonesty rises. There is the dog's leg, small, dark, and stiff. Its wrist extends back into Travis' sleeve.
"Travis!"
"What?" says Travis, smirking.
"What were you doing with Loss?" I say instead. I find that I am shaking.
"Fucking," he says, proud and mean. He's quoting me, though I'm not sure he knows it, even if there is a lilt of mockery in his voice.
Then he starts to cry. Oh, thank hook.
Choking, he hunches to hide his face. I know it's terrible for him to cry, and especially to let me see him cry right now, when he is being magnificent. But for now, I can still comfort him, even for this, the shame of having a mother. I put my arms right around him and pick him up, as if he were still a little boy. He presses his face against my shoulder, sobbing. His arms are bunched up between us, and the dog's paw jabs into my cheek. I turn my head and kiss its darling, darling little pads.
SIXTEEN SMALL
APOCALYPSES
The Apocalypse Reader Page 7