The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  My teeth started to hurt and I realized my jaw was tight. We pulled up into the carport behind my Mercury Topaz and Tianna put the truck into gear. I got out and took my stuff out of the back, carrying it inside.

  I loved that house...the groovy-dude architectural taste made it into a work of Brady Bunch art. It was like a bargain bin Frank Lloyd Wright creation—the whole foyer was visible through a floor-to-ceiling glass window with the front door in the middle of it. Not very secure, but for the rent we were paying, it was Beverly Hills on a Podunk budget.

  Almost every wall had a window in it looking through to the next room, and was filled with either plate glass or shelves laden with knick-knacks—or, would have been, if the knick-knacks were still there. As I came in, I realized that the walls were bare and the closet in the foyer was empty.

  I carried my stuff into the living room and saw that while my TV, recliner, and the shelf my mother had given us were still present and accounted for, everything else was missing: the sofa, all the pictures, tables, and lamps, the dresser that contained all the vinyl records for the turntable I’d bought her last Christmas, and the big mirror that had been hanging over it.

  I went into the bedroom. The bed and dressers were gone. The closet was empty of everything but my own clothes.

  The linen closet was empty and so was the bathroom medicine cabinet. I went into the kitchen and opened all the cupboards. The pots and pans were gone, the dishes, the blender, the Foreman were gone. My quesadilla maker was still there. The fridge had nothing in it but a bottle of margarita mix, a squirt-bottle of mustard, and a half-stick of butter.

  I came back outside. She was standing next to the Dodge, which was still running.

  “Do you have everything you need?” she asked. “I’ve got somebody waiting on me.”

  I still don’t know if I was actually confused or just playing dumb. Perhaps I only asked what came out of my mouth next because I didn’t want to accept the truth.

  “Everything I need?”

  “Yes.” Even though her voice was low and soft, the silence of the fall evening made it easy to hear her.

  I just stood there, as my mother was wont to say, ‘like a bump on a log’. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t an empty house. Concessions, maybe. Reconciliations, arguments, reassembly, repair, patchwork. Me sleeping on the couch for a while. Awkward breakfasts. Getting to know each other again. Apologies. Not using pet names for a while.

  Not this.

  I looked down at my feet, at the desert dust still ground into the rawhide of my boots. I wouldn’t need food. I wasn’t hungry. I wondered if I would ever be hungry again.

  I sighed and said, “Yes.”

  She opened the door, but didn’t get in. I was a deer in the headlights, literally and figuratively, on my feet in the washed-out white of the truck’s low-beams. I had enough time to think about asking her to stay, to think about asking her why she wasn’t staying, to ask her where the dog was. Our dog was not in the house, not in our house, the dog was not home. Where was the freaking dog?

  I opened my mouth to speak, but didn’t. She stepped up into the truck and sat behind the wheel.

  A few minutes later, my wife closed the door, put the Dodge in gear and backed out of the driveway into the street, slowly put it in drive, and drove away.

  I remained there in the dark, a shadow and piece of the night, standing next to my car listening to the distant sounds of the city.

  When I got tired of being cold, I went into the house and turned the heat on, then went into the living room and sat in the recliner. The acrid smell of burning dust from an unused heating unit filled the house.

  I looked up and saw the blinds over the living room’s big picture window. I had put them up on my mid-tour break seven months ago, when we had moved into the house. It had been a massive pain in the ass but I’d done it for her—they were too big and I had to redo the brackets several times, but I had been happy to do it. I was happy and looking forward to coming home for good.

  Home. It was my home. My house. My name was on the lease and the address was on my Army paperwork. I was paying the rent. But I had never lived in it.

  I sat in my armchair looking at the lights of the city, ignoring the stink of baking dust.

  After a while—maybe an hour, maybe three hours, I’m not sure—I got up and stood in the middle of the living room for a bit, my mind beginning to whirl. My eyes had become adjusted to the darkness, turning the house into a monochrome labyrinth, a mausoleum wallpapered in dingy yellow.

  I sniffed. Looking down, I saw the shelf.

  My mother had given it to us as a house-warming gift, a five-tiered curio shelf about four feet tall. It was made out of particle-board with a wood-grain veneer, and as fragile as a carton of eggs. Our wedding photos used to stand on it, in a large frame that was made to look like an open book. It also once displayed two music boxes and a backless clock inside a bell jar.

  I picked it up, carried it out onto the carport, and slammed it against the cement floor with everything I could muster. It exploded into six pieces. I picked up the biggest piece, a half-shelf with a leg sticking out of it, and used it to club the rest of the debris. A chunk of the board broke, bounced off my face, and twirled into the darkness. I ignored it. The end of the leg broke off and hit the ceiling.

  I threw the piece of wood in my hand and stood shivering with rage, trying to think of something else I could break. The laundry room was immediately to my left through an exterior door. I opened it and turned the light on.

  I was looking into a small space with a washer and dryer inside and garden—no, the gardening tools were gone. That was probably a good thing: we had a “Garden Weasel” that consisted of a long handle with three spiky rotors on the end of it and looked like some sort of medieval death-hammer.

  The washer and dryer were coin-operated; our last landlord had given them to us when he replaced the machines in the apartment complex’s open laundry. I’d had to pry the quarter boxes out—and to use them, you had to reach down into the mangled timer’s housing and pull a lever. An inconvenience, but worth it for a tough, high-capacity machine.

  As I went to close the door, I saw something written on the wall in pencil.

  It was very small and gave me chills every single time I saw it. We had discovered it the day we moved in, as we were installing the dryer. At the time, we called it our ‘good luck charm’.

  Someone who had once lived here had scrawled, This was a very happy home. 11/26/88

  My throat closed up and I held the top of the dryer like a little kid on a boogie board because I could feel it coming. I knew it was there lurking in the dark, cold house, when I saw the blinds. But when I quite literally saw the writing on the wall, I felt the top of my heart crack—and as I slouched there gripping the dryer for dear life, the entire thing broke into a thousand pieces.

  _______

  I was still sitting in the recliner when the first rays of Kentucky sunlight came over the trees, golden spears tracing long arcs across the wall and kitchen door, solid and heavy with snowlike dust. My right knee was bouncing and my eyes were raw and grainy.

  My cellphone rang. The opening bells of Ray LaMontagne’s “Gossip in the Grain”, tinny but always beautiful, resonated in the morning stillness. Ding ding ding...ding ...ding.

  It rang again. My hand came up off the chair’s arm and I wiped my wet nose with a paper towel, a piece of Bounty, because there was no toilet paper.

  Ding ding ding...ding...ding.

  I picked it up and looked at the screen as it rang again, in my hand. The digital readout told me it was 7:12 AM. I pressed the Call button and put it against my ear.

  I could hear someone breathing. I finally said in a listless voice, “Hello.”

  “Ross?” It was my mother Caroline in Georgia. “Are you home yet?”

  I swallowed and tried to speak. My vocal chords didn’t kick in at
first, and I had to stretch the word out.

  “—Yes.”

  “Are you there? Hello?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m home. I got home...last night.”

  “Oh,” said my mother. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  I blinked. How did she know? I sat up, slowly, like a mummy rising out of the sarcophagus, and huddled on the edge of my seat, hugging myself with the phone against my head. “What about?”

  “Your dad.”

  “My dad?” I asked. Like my voice, my thoughts seemed to be coming to me from some faraway place, as if I were listening to them on a shortwave radio. I felt as if I were on the airless moon, thousands of miles away from everything and everybody. I breathed, watching the motes of dust orbit my face. “What about my dad?”

  This wasn’t about the first shoe. This was the second shoe dropping.

  My mother sighed. Her voice was slow and measured and sympathetic. “He...I’m so sorry you had to come home to this, son. I’m so sorry. He had a heart attack yesterday. He was.... Ed’s gone. Eddie’s gone. His agent Max found him.”

  I listened to the birds outside. I hated them. “Goddamn,” I said.

  My mother didn’t respond, but I could feel her confusion.

  “She left me,” I said, looking at the floor. “All her stuff was gone when I got home. She’s gone too.”

  “Ohh, son. I’m sorry. There’s—there’s not really anything I can tell you that’ll make you feel better. Maybe it’s better this way, baby. Maybe you’re better off.”

  Knowing someone was listening to me ruptured whatever control I had developed during the night. I started sobbing. She listened to me as I struggled to maintain myself. When I had settled enough to listen, she spoke.

  “Why don’t you come home? Get out of that empty house for a little while and come to the funeral. They’re doing it in a couple of days. I hear there’s going to be a few of his fans there. It’ll be good for you, you’ll have somebody to talk to. You won’t be alone.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  After I got off the phone with her, I took a dose of melatonin, swung out the chair’s footrest, and took a nap for a few hours. When I woke up, I put a couple of outfits in my backpack with my laptop and left. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have taken all my clothes, because that was the last time I ever stepped foot in that house.

  Oriensligne burned around him as Pack lay in the dust by the well. He had managed to drag his father’s heavy corpse away from the fire before it had spread too far, but by the time he’d returned to the house, it had engulfed his mother and sister. They were black, peeling-bubbling figures, withered phantoms, sleeping in the inferno.

  His tears made tracks in the dirt on his face, landing on the glossy chrome of his father’s antique pistol. Pack held it now, as he curled protectively around his father’s body. He held the gun against his face and reveled in the smell of the oil and the familiar scent of his father’s hand on the sandalwood grip.

  He pretended that the gun was the last surviving part of his father, and that it represented a place where he could never be hurt again, where nothing could ever be taken from him as long as he lived. He went there, now, the flames rippling across the polished, scrollworked surface. He went there and slept.

  He would never come back.

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 1 “The Brine and the Bygone”

  Cats, Cradles, and Comic-Cons

  I WAS STANDING IN MY SHITTY HOTEL ROOM alone, adjusting my tie when it hit me that I was about to go to my father’s funeral. I suppose like any child, I must have assumed he was going to live forever.

  In a way, he will, I suppose. They say that the only immortality that can be achieved by mortal man is through the act of creation. My father managed to accomplish both of these feats in his lifetime.

  I finished straightening myself and left. My junky little car took some coaxing to start, but purred like a garbage disposal when I got it running. I pulled out of my parking space and took off across town, driving a little slower than usual. I wasn’t looking forward to my destination, and that had little to do with seeing my father dead in a box.

  Speaking of my father, I’d like to introduce you to Vincent Edward Richard Brigham.

  Yes, that’s four names. Born in June of the year of our Lord 1951, Ed survived your usual Southern childhood: church every Sunday and fatback ham with turnip greens and black-eyed peas on a regular basis.

  In high school, he started tinkering with the medium of fiction, and in the middle of his first year of law school, Ed discovered what he was meant to do and then he did the impossible: he started making a living writing fantasy novels south of the Mason-Dixon line. As you can imagine, passing the bar was no longer of any concern.

  Over the next forty years, my dad made a name for himself in the hearts and minds of bookworms everywhere with his novel series The Fiddle and the Fire, a fictional biography of a man’s life in pursuit of vengeance across a fantasy-western world.

  We lost track of each other somewhere between that second and third decade, so to speak, but he went on to become a semi-legend in the entertainment world...not exactly a name on the lips or scripts of Katie Couric or Mary Hart, but whispered to each other over dusty paperbacks at the neighborhood book shop and doggedly tracked down on Amazon. He was like the American god that he turned out to be, ubiquitous but invisible.

  I barely registered the drive to the chapel and before I knew it, I was there. Unfortunately, I was nowhere near as invisible as Ed used to be.

  The teenager at the podium, who had just given his own personal eulogy, was wearing a polished revolver like the ones from my dad’s books. I hoped that the gun wasn’t real, as he stepped down from the podium at the front of the funeral party and returned to his seat.

  Following him back to his pew, I locked eyes with a pretty girl a few rows back, on the other side of the room. Her big, bright eyes, platinum-blonde hair, and serene expression made her look like a rock-chick version of a young Joanne Woodward. She waved daintily at me with a hand clad in a fingerless black glove.

  I looked away. A heavyset girl dressed like a cross between Annie Oakley and a valkyrie stepped up to the podium, and gave her name as Judith Raske. She began to give a very sincere, heartfelt eulogy that I couldn’t quite pay attention to.

  The man in the casket had no blood relation to anyone in the funeral parlor except for me. I sat in the back, wedged into a narrow space somewhere between schadenfreude and disappointment. I knew that Ed had managed to squeeze out enough of his fantasy series to amass a cult following, but none of us had expected to see almost two hundred people crammed into this tiny chapel.

  The mourners considered themselves members of an extended family to three-time Hugo Award nominee Ed Brigham, the deceased fantasy novelist now resting on the dais at the head of the room.

  I couldn’t believe I felt like an interloper at my own father’s funeral.

  Most of them had the good sense to show up in their Sunday finest, but many of them wore ratty jeans and T-shirts with ancient, unintelligible decals peeling off of them. Those people who had the money, the guts, and the knowhow to craft quasi-medieval costumes were inspired by the finery my father had described in his book series. They were resplendent in their hand-crafted chain mail, their wide-brimmed hats, their leather long-coats and rich red tabards.

  To my right, beyond my mother, was a churlish-looking, shaven-headed buffalo in biker leathers (LIVE TO RIDE, RIDE TO LIVE). In front of me, a very attractive woman in a conservative business skirt. To my left, across the central aisle, was a crater-faced youth that looked like Scottish Death in a Dropkick Murphys T-shirt, a black kilt with tactical pockets, and black combat boots. I saw several older women that clustered together in their pew, looking for all the world like a genteel country knitting society.

  I could see the waxy white bald head of my father’s literary agent Max Bayard where he sat in the front row, his impecca
ble suit the soulless gray color of an office carpet.

  I tuned back into the proceedings just to catch the words I dreaded hearing.

  “—And although our good friend E. R. Brigham is now in—ahh—a better place,” Judith Raske was saying, “—we were regrettably left without closure to his long-running fantasy series, The Fiddle and the Fire. For those of you that might be unfamiliar with it, this was a string of novels that followed their protagonist from his childhood as the boy Pack, growing up on his father’s plantation, through the massacre of his parents at the hands of the Redbird bandit Tem Lucas, and on into his adult life as the gunslinger Normand Kaliburn.

  “The final novel Mr. Brigham began was The Gunslinger and the Giant, which went unfinished due to his sudden and unfortunate passing this year. It was to recount the Battle of Ostlyn, the outcome of the war, and the conclusion of Normand’s vendetta against Tem Lucas. It saddens all of us to see this long-told tale go uncompleted.”

  I felt my heart quicken. Frozen mice scurried through my veins. Bayard looked over his shoulder at me, the windows glinting on his eyeglasses.

  “I would like to take this opportunity to inform everyone assembled about—ahh—a petition that was started on the online Fiddle forums soon after this terrible news reached the internet fan community,” said Judith.

  I was very aware of this petition; it was the source of my current anxiety. She adjusted her glasses, bumping the microphone with the Batman-style swordbreakers running down her bronze gauntlet. A muffled thud reverberated throughout the room. “Excuse me. It started slowly, but soon reached over twenty thousand signatures.”

  If I was drinking something, I probably would have spewed it all over the person sitting in front of me.

  “This petition began half in jest, according to the man who put it together, Sawyer Winton,” the girl said, then paused, squinting into the congregation. “Sawyer, could you come on up, please?”

  Someone stood up behind me; I turned to see a slim young man in a sweater and cargo pants. His black hair curled rakishly over one piercing gray eye, and he had the scratchy beginnings of a handsome Jack Sparrow goatee. His healthy, clean-cut look gave me a sense of maturity that would give him conviction and purpose.