by Adam Rapp
When I came out, Curl was standing next to the Trinitron and she was leaning funny and she was chewing gum all slow and ugly. She was wearing my Pro Flyer that fell off and holding her face and she was only like six inches away from the wall. She was chewing that gum so hard it was like it was the only thing keeping her from leaving. Her sunflower dress was all crooked and you could see the twenty dollars from her trick scattered on the floor.
For some reason Curl kept reaching up and touching the wallpaper. It was like the only thing that she knew was them fish. And she was all quiet and lopsided like she gets after she does some bazooka. Curl’s eyes was so big it was like she got turned into a doll.
I walked over to her and put my hand on her arm.
She went, “Hey, Custis,” and kept chewing her gum.
I was like, “Hey,” and just stood there.
The curtains was twisted and the mattress was half off the bed and the Bible was spread in the middle of the floor like a smashed bird. Curl just kept staring at the wallpaper.
The baby was crying but I couldn’t see him.
Curl reached over and grabbed my hand.
She went, “You sleep okay?”
I just nodded and kept looking for the baby’s TV.
Then she went, “You hungry?” and her voice sounded like it was trapped in a French fry bag.
I was like, “I’m okay.”
Then Curl went, “You goin’ back to bed?” but I didn’t answer and you could tell she didn’t really care cuz she was too busy staring at the wallpaper.
Some car lights shined in the room and lit up them wallpaper fish. Somehow them wallpaper fish looked scared, too.
Then I saw the baby’s TV. It was turned over on the other side of the bed and it was cracked and the baby wasn’t in it but you could still hear it crying.
Then Curl talked again. She went, “Tomorrow we’re gonna go swimming in the pool, ain’t we, Boobie?” but Boobie wasn’t even there.
Curl went, “They got a swimming pool out back. And the water’s bluer than blue.”
She said the water was so blue she seen a quarter in it, and then she gave me my Pro Flyer. Her foot just sort of kicked it toward me like it had its own brain and shit.
Some more car lights shined into the room and that’s when I saw the baby. He was underneath the bed in his shitted diaper, and his arms and legs was all swimming out like one of them Des Plaines River turtles that gets flipped on its back.
Then Boobie came back in the room with a big book of matches. I looked at him and then down at the baby. Boobie’s face was so still it looked painted.
I went, “Hey, Boobie.”
He didn’t say nothing back so I was like, “Hey, Boobie, you okay?” but he just kept staring.
Then for some reason I went, “You got any gum?”
I don’t know why I said that shit. I think it’s cuz I could smell how sweet Curl’s breath was.
Then Boobie came over to us and opened Curl’s mouth and took her gum and he put it in my mouth and held his hand over my face and made me chew. It tasted like spit and it tasted purple and it tasted kind of like a pencil, too.
Then Boobie went into the bathroom and started lighting matches.
That’s when I reached under the bed and got the baby. He grabbed onto my thumb and wouldn’t let go. The seam in his forehead was dirty so I cleaned it with some spit, and then I bounced him in my arms and sang that “Hushabye Mountain” song till he stopped crying.
You could smell the matches burning in the bathroom pretty thick.
I was like, “Curl, you smell that?” but she didn’t answer. She was too busy staring at the wallpaper.
When Boobie came out of the bathroom that book of matches was burning right in his hand. He walked a few steps and then he dropped it in the middle of the bed and it caught fire and he just stood there and watched it for a minute. Curl kept watching the wallpaper fish and I was frozen with the baby. After a minute the feathers in the pillows was on fire, too, and they was flying all over the room like electric snow.
When the fire started crawling off the bed and onto the floor, the alarm went off. Boobie grabbed the baby’s TV and pulled Curl toward the door.
Everything was all wack for a second, but I had the baby and I had my red puffy coat and I had both of my Pro Flyers.
It only took us like twenty seconds to get back in the Skylark.
I was glad I had that puffy red coat, cuz it was getting seriously cold out.
When we pulled away from the parking lot I looked back at our room. You could see how that electric snow was falling across the window. You could see the little otel Motel sign blinking pink and you could see how them flames in room 4 was already licking up the curtains.
My Aunty Frisco used to say
that a man who hits a dog
is likely to kick it in a month.
The snow’s coming down sideways. Curl says horizontal but I just say sideways cuz it’s easier to say. I think horizontal is the biggest word she knows. And she says it all slow, too, just to make it sound fancy.
We’ve been living in the van for a week. It ain’t nothing like the tent. It ain’t even like the Skylark. It’s just a old, torn-up school van that don’t got no tires. It’s so old it ain’t even yellow no more. It’s just this wack non-color.
Most of the windows is smashed and all of the back seats is missing. The inside smells like one of them dead refrigerators from Renfro Park. The whole van leans to the left kind of lopsided like it’s trying to listen to them other cars hissing on the highway.
We sleep at the back end, where the van don’t lean too bad. We found some couch cushions behind this furniture store off of Highway 227. When you line them cushions up right it ain’t so bad. But when they spread apart that crooked metal floor feels like a brick in the middle of your back.
For a table we flipped a paint can and stuck a stop sign on top. It gets bumped every time Boobie skates for his Basics, but it makes you feel like it’s a official crib. It’s like there ain’t no real life inside a place if you don’t got no table.
Curl had to stop changing the baby’s diaper cuz her hands ain’t been working right. Somewhere back in Wisconsin she caught a lung frost. And it’s gotten worse in the last few days. Right after we skated from the otel Motel that coughing started.
According to the map we’re in this place called Nimrod, Minnesota, by the Detroit Lakes. Curl tried telling me that Detroit is in Michigan but she can’t read the map cuz her eyes is so bad. I’m the one who does all the reading now.
Before we got to Nimrod we drove by the Frames Landing Campground. I tried to get Boobie to let us stay there cuz there was other people with families and we’d be able to make friends and steal shit, but he just kept shaking his head and talking about how where we needed to be was as close to nowhere as possible.
And Nimrod’s about as close to nowhere as I’ve ever seen. There ain’t nothing here but snow and trees and these birds that is so tough they don’t even gotta fly south and shit.
Once in a while you hear a car going by way off on Highway 71 but that’s about it. I seen some jets one day, too. They was silver and there was three of them and when they flew by it was so loud it almost busted the drums in my ears.
The cold ain’t helping Curl’s lung frost none. When she sleeps you can see that froggy heartbeat going slower and slower in her eye. And sometimes you just sit there and count it cuz you think counting it’ll keep it from going too slow. Sometimes it goes so slow you think you can hear it and shit.
Everything she tries to eat just gets spit back up all over her sunflower dress. There ain’t no doubt that that bazooka’s got her stomach now. Her ribs is so big they look like claws trying to bust through her sides. I try talking about food, like Ding Dongs and Nutty Bars and Little Tonio microwave burritos, just to see if it might make her ribs go back down, but she just looks away and stares off with them big froggy eyes.
I even told her ab
out this skinny little snowfish I seen swimming in the Crow Wing River, way over by where Boobie hides the Skylark. I told her how it was doing somersaults and flipping its fins around. And I told her how I was going to catch it and give it to her so she could gut it and clean it and cook it up, but she just half-smiled so you could see how her teeth is turning gray.
It don’t help that it started snowing sideways.
Every time Curl coughs it sounds like her lung bubbles is tearing. Boobie keeps her wrapped in this sheepskin coat he stole from a Wendy’s when we was still back in Wisconsin. We was just about to cross the border on Highway 2 and big-ass Lake Superior was all huge and icy-looking off in the distance when he saw that rest-stop sign and pulled over. He walked into the Wendy’s in his plain white T-shirt and walked out with that sheepskin coat and a big bag of French fries.
Now Boobie wears this old softball jacket that he found in the trunk of the Skylark. It’s blue and it says “Elliot” on the chest.
The baby wears this little puffy snowsuit that Curl stole from this big outlet store off the highway. It’s pink and it’s got a hood. Sometimes we put this McDonald’s napkin over his face so it don’t get frostbit. We make sure to poke a hole in it so he can breathe. It’s weird cuz it makes the baby look like a doll that never got finished. Sometimes I have to look under it cuz I get this spooky-ass feeling that his face has disappeared. It’s always there, though.
We’ve been keeping a coffee can lit in the back of the van and that fire gets to blazing pretty crisp sometimes, but Curl just keeps shaking and coughing. And she picks at her hands so hard it’s like she’s trying to pull the moons out of her fingernails. The only time she leaves the van is to shit and piss.
Boobie taped newspapers to the windows to keep the snow out. We found some old yellow curtains that was in the trunk of the Skylark, too, but we only put one of them on the window. Curl uses the other one as a blanket.
We all sleep in our clothes. My pants feel like they’ve growed right over my skin. And I got a bruise on my leg from my gat.
Even though she knows she ain’t supposed to get no colder, every night Curl wakes me up and begs me to pull one of them newspapers back cuz she thinks there’s a big black turkey hopping around outside the van. She says it’s got monster wings and that she can hear it dancing on the roof. She says she can feel how that black turkey wants to reach inside her chest with one of its long greasy turkey toes and steal her heart.
But every time I pull the newspapers back there ain’t nothing there. Curl says it flies away when I look cuz it can read my thoughts or some shit. I know all that black turkey stuff ain’t nothing but maybe some dream Curl had, but I still play along with the newspaper game almost every night just to make her feel better.
After the first sideways snow all the birds that ain’t tough flew away in big boomerangs. Then the trees died. Curl says the trees died cuz birds got medicine in their wings that keeps the trees alive. Sometimes at night you can hear them dead trees breathing.
Yesterday Boobie scraped some cough syrup from a Amoco station in this town called Oylen, but all that did was make Curl fall asleep twice as long. And she slept so hard we was afraid she wasn’t gonna wake up. She was so still shit got kind of scary for a minute. That froggy heartbeat in her eye almost stopped like four times. Boobie had to draw on her with a marker to make her wake up. For some reason he drew a fish. He drew it right on her face, too. That shit looked kinda spooky and dead to me. Maybe it’s cuz he gave the fish a X instead of a eye. For some reason it made Curl wake up.
When Boobie wasn’t looking I tried to wipe that fish off of Curl’s face with some snow, but I couldn’t get it all the way, so every time you look at her now, the first thing you see is that froggy heartbeat and the second thing you see is that picture of the fish with the X for a eye.
Curl told me that if I find a bird I should kill it and take all the feathers off and put them over her heart. She says there’s medicine in bird feathers and that it’s the only way to make her lung frost go away.
When I went bird hunting yesterday I saw this little farm that had this wack-looking chicken hopping in the dirt. It looked more like a rat with feathers than a chicken.
That farm was in the middle of nowhere and shit. The only thing around it was this big old black forest that looked like all the trees was burnt. It didn’t look like nobody lived there but a ghost or maybe one of them Big Foot freaks you see in comic book pictures and shit.
Tomorrow I’m going to roll by there and steal that chicken for Curl. I know a chicken ain’t no real bird cuz of how chickens don’t fly, but it’s close enough, and it don’t seem like Curl’s got time to be choosy, cuz along with them yellow smears under her eyes her piss is turning brown.
Back in Rockdale this old skanky sucker who hung out by the water tower called Joe Greenway got brown piss and he died like four days later.
Last night Boobie stayed up with Curl all night trying to get her to eat some soup, but she just kept spitting it up. That lung frost poison ain’t letting nothing stay in her body. The baby sure liked the soup, though.
When you look through the windows some of the dead trees look like giant monster claws scratching at the sky. Others look like old, crooked dinosaur bones that got cooked by a fire.
Curl says that if you walk too close to them trees they’ll kidnap you. She says that even though they don’t got no eyes you can feel them looking.
She says one night she woke up and saw them dead trees running around. She says they only run around like that when they think you’re sleeping.
It’s like that big black turkey and them running trees is the only shit Curl cares about now.
She said she saw a movie once where a tree ran down a hill and killed this man cuz he tried to chop it down with a axe. She said it ran right down that hill like it had some kicks on.
At night the sky glows purple like the light from a TV when a VCR movie is done playing. And the stars get so big they look like knives coming at you. Some of them stars look like spaceships, too. Especially them blue ones.
It would be cool if one of them blue stars came and a spaceman lit up his insides and showed us his moon bones. We’d let him stay with us for a few days. We’d give him some of Boobie’s Basics and let him mess with the baby so he could study him and learn about Earth. Curl says the best way to learn about humans is by studying babies cuz they ain’t been fucked or starved yet.
Them spacemen probably got some pretty cool stuff on their spaceship, too — like them video games you play with helmets and rocks that tell the future and computers and robots that can sing Pepsi-Cola commercials and shit.
And if things go pretty smooth that spaceman might even invite us to go back with him, and he’d give us astronaut suits and put the baby in a little gravity crib with galaxy blankets and we’d leave the TV behind and skate with the aliens and the fire from the launch pad would make a big launch burn on the van and then — blow! — our spaceship would blast off and like four seconds later the pigs would pull up in their Impalas and their Caprice Classics, like skeighty-eight of them suckers, and they’d jump out and slam the doors and watch our spaceship disappear through the purple sky like a little golden chicken egg.
That would be pretty crisp.
All Earth’s got is a bunch of Joliet suckers and Rockdale suckers and pit bulls and shit, anyways. And the Joliet suckers poison the Rockdale suckers cuz they don’t want them stealing their money, and when the Rockdale suckers die the pit bulls eat their bones, and then the Joliet suckers catch the pit bulls and turn them into hamburgers and French fries and eat them and they get so fat their money suits don’t fit them no more, and then they gotta buy some new ones, and that’s what it’s all about down here on Earth — some rich Joliet suckers getting richer so they can buy cell phones and emails and fatter money suits.
Them spacemen probably got stronger hearts than humans, too, cuz they don’t got no pit bull worries or no money suit worr
ies or no Bob Motley worries. All them worries make your heart small, and the smaller your heart, the less it glows.
I think that’s how come Jesus always has that glow around his hair in them Bible pictures — cuz his heart was so big it made his head light up and shit.
This one Rockdale hippie man called Jerry who hangs out down by the Speedway used to go around saying Jesus was a nigger and that all them people in the Bible was niggers. I told him how Bob Motley says you can’t get no halo if you’re a nigger cuz of all that motor oil they put in their hair, but Jerry just looked the other way and kept handing out Jesus pamphlets to all the suckers at the Speedway.
Bob Motley said that niggers don’t got no hearts. He said that their chests is filled with donkey shit instead.
Curl says that you get a halo by growing your heart big, and that halos don’t got nothing to do with the color of your skin.
When I’m in the van keeping Curl warm I get to thinking about everything that’s happened; about all the driving and Dumpster diving and all them vending machines we tilted and that highway hiss and Boobie always putting green Gatorade down his dickhole cuz of his clap and the otel Motel and Curl’s lung frost and the baby and about skeighty-eight other things and I get worried that one of them migration headaches is gonna come and never leave my head.
Doing them thirty-threes helps sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes they do.
If it ain’t too windy, once in a while you can hear a train whistle. And you’re like, “Damn, a train,” and you look around but all you see is trees.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to the little kids who was in the van. They probably got their heads chopped off or some shit.
I think some big tall man in a black coat walks over the earth with a axe, and when he finds some little kids crashed in a school van, he pulls them out all nice and friendly and they think he’s going to use that axe to chop down a wall and save some little girl who’s trapped, but then he lines them up shortest-to-tallest and talks to them all soft with that trust in his voice and maybe even gives them some gum or candy or a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar like Sidekick, and just when they think he’s going to help them get back to their school he creeps up behind them and — whop-whop-whop — he chops their heads off instead.