Emporium

by Adam Johnson

  The Marty that rounds the corner, though, is hard to look at. He is tall, slightly stooped, with long jet hair that curtains his face. One eye points down and in a bit, making him seem half interested in something just beyond the tip of his nose. He looks almost sad, which is not what I expected after all of Jimbo’s descriptions of the crash scene on our drive up—“They found the steering wheel in the tree, a fucking tree, man”—the amnesia’s peculiar effects—“He doesn’t even know his dad’s name but he walks right to his locker and wheels out the combo”—horrific surgeries—“The third time they sewed it on it stuck”—and high school dramas—“Tasha and I stood by him at the pep rallies; we were the only ones.”

  Jimbo and Marty do an elaborate handshake that ends with a knuckle punch and slips into a last toke off an imaginary joint; “fff,” they inhale. There are a lot of “wow”s and “dude”s in their reunion, and after neither notices that I am standing right next to them, I imagine as sort of a joke that they walk off without speaking to me, which they do.

  I follow clear carpet runners down the hall, where there are two white doors. I open the wrong one. Inside sits a boy of about fourteen. His swingarm desk lamp is on, and he leans back in a blue director’s chair, his feet up on the white laminated desk, reading a racing magazine. He looks at me, looks back at the page. But I know this chair, the way canvas webbing gathers under your shoulder blades after a certain amount of nothing. I know how long it takes your ankles to go numb from propping them on a desk like that. I see years of airplane models and electric cars, a thousand magazines read atop tiger print sheets, all the things anyone would see, if they’d just open the door.

  The kid sets down his issue of PitCrew. It’s the one featuring Rick Kreiger’s 500 win. Then he does a strange thing. He takes his desk lamp and swivels its armature so the hard bulb shines in my face.

  This is where one story could become another.

  This other story I could tell would be about the following years when your father doesn’t open the door. It would have to do with the after-school jobs you pick up to kill time, about the GM family sedan proving ground behind Futron’s industrial park, how you can spend whole lunch breaks without taking your eyes off circling cars that stop only to change the drivers who will run them into the ground. This different story would have to do with a mythology class in which you discover the gods are all-petty and their names are hard to remember, or the endless chain of nature shows about Africa a skilled TV viewer can find from midnight on, or the place your mind goes while waiting for a diode to finally light reject-red.

  A woo-hoo high-five sounds in the next room, and this boy and I look toward the source, our eyes landing on a poster of the space shuttle. There is a white plastic intercom next to my shoulder that surprises me when it comes to life. “What’s your 10–20, copy?” a man asks over a hail of barking—the kid’s dad, I assume. When there is no answer, the father says, “Roger this: the griddle is firing up. The Runnin’ Rebs won the toss, and they’re taking the field.”

  The boy returns the light to his magazine. “Please,” he says, with an air of boredom and indifference aimed at me, his father, and life in general. I have nothing deep to add, so I go.

  When I open Marty’s door, there is a giant snake, but I try to act cool. The room’s darker than I expect, though I can clearly see the snake cage takes up a third of it, framed floor to ceiling with studs and chicken wire, and there is a faint smell of cat piss. Marty is shaking the box of scorpions. He holds it to his ear, his eyes roaming the room, looking right past me as he listens. He squints some, smiles. Satisfied, he sets it on a junk-strewn desk without opening it. Marty doesn’t need to look in that box just yet, either.

  Jimbo reloads the bong and holds it out to me. It hovers between us, and I do not take it. In less than a year, after I fail mythology and the doors of Futron are chained shut, Jimbo will kiss me, awkwardly, on the neck, in a secretary stable named Fuddrucker’s. Even now, I look at him suspiciously. He knows I don’t smoke, and this stoner’s etiquette is only for Marty’s benefit. The snake hangs from a ceiling beam at the edge of my vision, its skin the felt green of a Vegas gaming table.

  “Go for it,” Marty says. “Bong up.”

  Again, one eye points down, and the way he has to look out of the top of it humbles him in a way I don’t expect.

  Over the intercom, the dad says, “The Rebs are kicking off.” Marty ignores him, even though the barking in the background makes it sound like his father is being eaten by wolves or something. With the static on the intercom, I imagine a man on a radio in Africa. Or a pilot with hydraulic trouble, cutting up with the tower.

  There is a Polaroid taped to the wall, and I know this must be Tasha. She’s everything I hoped she’d be: posed in a skydiving dragsuit, her chi-chis are perfect, even through billowy orange nylon, as she stands above a dark and sleeping DC-3.

  I nod toward the photo. “Who’s the fox?”

  “That’s Tasha, the love of my life. We almost died together.”

  “That when you messed up your face?”

  Jimbo looks at me like, You fuck, we had ground rules.

  “Car crash,” Marty says.

  “Rough deal,” I tell him. “Jimbo says you can’t remember most stuff.”

  “Some stuff.”

  “At least you had Tasha.” We glance at the wall. “You couldn’t forget her.”

  Marty’s not sure if I’m dicking with him or not. “She says we were just dating before the crash, but I know it was more than that. On the outside she was a stranger, and I couldn’t say much about her life, but I knew her, you know?”

  Marty says this, and my head wanders across eight time zones, a continent away. I find myself looking through the snake cage to the wall beyond, thinking about the boy in the next room.

  “It doesn’t bite,” Marty says.

  “What?”

  “Its mouth is open to check you out. It has glands that can see your heat.”

  Sure enough, the snake’s mouth is open. It has three loops around a pine ceiling beam, and it screws itself down some, tail sucking up into the coil of its square trunk, head unreeling to arc closer to my heat.

  “What’s with the snake?” I ask.

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Let’s feed it,” Jimbo says.

  “No, it ate last week.”

  Jimbo lifts his eyebrows. “Meow,” he says.

  “Meow,” Marty says.

  “What about the caiman—you still got the caiman?” Jimbo asks Marty, then looks at me. “Wait till you see the fucking caiman.”

  I think of the Cayman Islands, which my mom says is the worst route there is. After Tammy dies, my mother covers her schedule there for a while, but she won’t even speak of the layovers. They don’t have any laws down there, she says. You will never know, is all she tells me. But after a couple years with Ted my mother changes her tune, and they even pop over to beach bum a time or two. Tammy is never pulled from under the D.C. river ice, and Mom likes to say Tammy’s really just laying low in the Caymans, high on piña coladas and that special light they have down there, playing baccarat with the boys at the Royale.

  Marty sees the confusion on my face. “A caiman’s a kind of crocodile,” he says, “from Central America.”

  “You have a crocodile?”

  “It’s a kind of crocodile.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Jimbo smiles.

  We go out back to see the caiman. There is a blue pool with green patio furniture, all surrounded by silver fencing that leads to the base of the bluff above. Everything looks cool, my hands are in my pockets, and the sun is bright in my eyes. Then the wolves come at us, sprinting across a triangular yard of close-cropped yellow grass with their long necks down, their rolling haunches kicking out behind them. The chain-link fence between us isn’t even chest high—four, four and a half feet at best. When they reach the fence, they are coming over, I know it, and the assault at hand is
something I feel first as a rattle in my breath and then as a loosening in my veins. Instead, they plunge to the base of the fence, legs splayed, and snap at us out of the sides of their mouths as if they are chewing the metal sprinkler heads.

  “Shut those damn wolves up,” Marty’s father says from the patio. He is shirtless, in swim trunks, basting a mounded platter of meat with a sauce-stiffened brush, the kind you use to paint a house.

  “They’re only half wolf, Dad. Half Mackenzie, half malamute.”

  “I’ll kill them, Marty. I swear,” his father says in a soft way, speaking to meat he dabs with care.

  For now though, the wolves are barking machines, vicious and ceaseless, noxious as tire fires. Marty walks, arms crossed, past the pool, until he stands looking down over the short fence in admiration at their snarling faces, as if big, mean animals were a rarity in this world.

  Jimbo follows suit. He kneels before the fence and touches their wet noses whenever snapping teeth catch in the chain link. In a sweet, childlike voice, he insults them. “Come to Daddy, you iddle widdle teethy fucks,” he says, and pinches a nose, prompting one wolf to reel back and pop the other’s folded ear.

  “Christ,” Marty’s father yells. “Leave the damn things be. It’s Saturday. The Rebs are playing.” The woman who first answered the door slides a blue-screened TV out the kitchen pass-through, and Marty’s father turns all the knobs on the intercom, shouting “Game time” into every room.

  Because of all the Wild Kingdom episodes I talk about, my mom tells Ted I’m a big nature fan. One Sunday morning at the SkyLounge, he brings me the gift of a “Safariland” snow globe he says is from Africa, though there’s something like Safariland in Florida, too. The globe features plastic cheetahs, giraffes, and gazelles in brown grasslands, racing full hilt into a surprise blizzard. It is Hecho en Mexico.

  So I’m suspicious of the wolves, which are at once completely unreal in this Vegas backyard, yet so obviously dangerous I feel it in my toes. To a lesser degree, I feel the same way about a family barbecue, which is something I’ve never been to.

  Somehow satisfied with the wolves at hand, Marty stares up at the imposing rock formations above. Out in the bright light of day, the scars on Marty’s face pronounce themselves with the clear slickness of sexual skin. I follow his gaze up to the communications tower, and the hard throb of the red light on top hypnotizes me. It’s the red light I look for with my current meter all day at Futron, and this red seems right, the way, after looking into a million circuits, you can just feel when one’s going to go reject on you.

  Above the tower, a jet splits the October sky, wavering and adjusting on approach to LAS. Its nose floats much lower than a DC-9. This is a Lockheed L-1011.

  I know the outlines of airplanes because, at sixteen, I spend a weekend making marker drawings of jetliners and quizzing my mother as we sit on a gold-comforted hotel bed in Michigan. When she gets all the flash cards right, I know she will pass her United test in the morning and move to Detroit the following week. The L-1011 is an easy one: its wingtips curve up at the ends, so from below they look cut off.

  Ted tells me he can fly a jet, if push comes to shove, if that’s what it comes down to. I don’t have much to say to that. The statement somehow implies my father doesn’t have what it takes, when it comes down to it, which is why he may or may not be dead. I tell Ted there’s a god of flying. Rickimus maybe. Rick something or other. Something-something-rus, for sure.

  Marty’s father tries a softer tone. He is standing at the grill with a long fork, and the heat from the coals is enough to distort the edges of things, to make the brown of the roof and the blue of the sky trade places for an instant. “Come on, Marty,” he says, “bring your friends over for some grub. The Runnin’ Rebs are playing. They’re your favorite. They’re playing Arizona. Remember that big game against Arizona a few years back? You loved that game.”

  “We’re just going to look at the caiman, Dad.”

  “Why can’t you leave that gator alone?”

  “It’s called a caiman, Dad.”

  With a fork in one hand and the platter in other, Marty’s father lifts his arms in a shrug of indifference. “Whatever. I don’t see the attraction. You tell me the appeal.”

  He throws the meat on a grill so hot the steaks bounce; they squeak and whine. The wolves go crazy over this. They too let out short, high moans, like children.

  The sounds remind me of a nature program I see one night that sticks in my head for reasons that will remain unclear until I eventually meet Ted. On the show, a man walks into brown savanna chewgrass to reconstruct a takedown. From the dirt, he collects whitened ribs and hocks and knuckles. He examines them, noting teeth and claw marks. A horn, he decides, is an important clue. A soundtrack of feasting hyenas plays as he points at trees and hills, deciding how many predators, direction of attack, strategy, and carcass distribution. Then this man looks into the camera. There’s no rest for the hungry, he says. So come, let’s see what the lions are up to, and we watch his Jeep drive off into the plain, the bumper folding down tall grass that springs up behind him, and he is gone.

  Ted tells me he has my father’s binoculars, which are all that’s left. He’s been meaning to give them to me.

  Marty nods a forget-him look toward his father and leads us to the caiman. Jimbo’s eyes light up at the prospect, and we walk, hands in pockets, in our natural order—indifferent, disruptive, and doubtful—along pool decking bordered by chain link and wolves that cut their faces trying to take our ankles.

  In the other corner of the yard is the most ridiculous thing I have seen. Another chain-link fence, complete with posts and gate, stands a foot and a half tall. I mean, it doesn’t even come to your knees.

  “You’re kidding me with this,” I say.

  “It’s all you need,” Marty says. “Caimans can’t climb.”

  “This is such bullshit,” I tell him and make a show of stepping over the fence, rather than through the tiny gate. Jimbo follows my lead. We cross tan gravel that crunches under our boots, stop in front of a lone blue kiddie pool. There is no shade, just brown and blue.

  “There it is,” Marty says.

  “Did I fuckin’ tell you, or what,” Jimbo says.

  Inside the pool floats a four-foot reptile, motionless, with a thin, tooth-rimmed snout. It can’t weigh thirty-five pounds. Its eyes are cataract-black, and it doesn’t even seem to breathe.

  In life, some things will come clear to you. There are the knowns—the exact video-feed frequency that unscrambles pornography, for instance, the foot-pounds of lift inside the hot, distorted edge of air cutting over a 737 wing, the speed at which your mother endlessly circles the city in her gold Cadillac after your father leaves, or the way young dictators are known to buy stewardesses drinks in the lounge of the Cayman Royale.

  And then there are the others, the things that aren’t so easy. There’s the boxy loop of youth, a decade that leaves your ears ringing with television and loneliness. There is the way Tammy’s body becomes one of the “urecoverables” beneath the D.C. ice. Then there’s an overbright morning at the SkyLounge when Ted mentions that, technically, I might have a younger brother in Africa. Eventually comes a moment you accept the not knowing, like a first step into the blue, when you must trust the shifty cliff gods to see you down.

  I stand and stare at the reptile. Reflected in the water is the tower above, the deep ruby strobe seeming to beat from the caiman itself. “That’s totally fake,” I say.

  “Come on, look at it,” Jimbo says. “There it is.”

  “Fumble,” Marty’s father calls out to us. “Check it out. Rebs’re first and goal.” He is sitting in a folding chair strung with nylon webbing, beer and fork in the same hand, but he’s watching more of us than the game.

  The wolves still sprint along the perimeter of their run, frothing and clipping, their legs tripping them into balls that tumble, roll, and emerge as charging blurs.

  “The Rebs are goi
ng to reverse. Hundred bucks says it. Remember when I taught you the reverse? You weren’t even ten.”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “The Rebs are gonna go for it. Bring your friends over and check out the game,” he says, and when we don’t respond, he stands up. “I’m telling you to leave that stupid thing alone.”

  Marty and his father have a moment when they eye each other across the pool. Jimbo leans in close to me, his mouth hovering by my ear. “I dare you to touch it,” he whispers. Signals I don’t understand pass between father and son. Marty’s father then heads for us, walking barefoot and stiff-legged around the pool with his beer, throwing dirty looks at the ceaseless wolves. He, too, steps right over the fence and walks gingerly, arms out, over the rocks. He comes to stand beside me at the edge of the kiddie pool, so that he has to yell past me and Jimbo at his son. “What’s the fucking deal with this thing,” he says. “Show me the appeal. It doesn’t do anything. It just sits there.”

  “I think it’s fake.”

  Drinking his beer, he glares at me like I’m an idiot. “What’s the point? What’s the big deal? You got a car and a girl and a family. Your favorite game’s on. There’s steaks and beer. You do fucking remember what steak tastes like, don’t you?” He stops and turns toward the wolves. “Shut up,” he yells.

  “Dad, I’m not hearing you now, not when you’re like this.”

  I stare at the caiman that hovers in the water, unblinking, legs out, heartbeat red.

  “I’m with him,” I say. “What’s the point?”

  “There is no point,” Marty’s father says and kicks the side of the kiddie pool. The sides yaw and wow with the waves, and the caiman, frozen, rides up and down. “See?” he says. “It doesn’t do anything.”

  There is no motion from the caiman, nothing.

  We look from the pool to Marty’s father as he knocks back the last of his beer. “Watch this,” he says and leans out to drop the can on the caiman’s back. There is only a hollow sound when it bounces off. “Boy, what a barrel of fun this thing is. I’m glad it takes up a third of our yard. I’m glad I can’t sleep for those fucking wolves, too.”