by Steve Vernon
It grows me back.
The news plays on, those earnest talking heads, bobbing like overfed marionettes. There are politicians and taxes being raised. I could do something about that. A family of four killed in a head-on collision with a semi rig. I could do something about that too.
I had to decide. The night was coming on, heavy and inevitable. A bombing in Ireland? A massacre in Africa? These were too far away. I wasn’t ready to save the world.
Not yet.
One day perhaps. One day I might go downstairs and whisper the name of the world into the mouth of a jar.
What would happen?
I am the conscience of the king. Judge, jury and executioner. I am the hangman. The spider. The god.
I am the conduit.
Finally, I saw it.
A child molester released on a technicality. The arresting officer read him his rights upon apprehension but the man claimed he did not know enough English to understand what the officer was talking about. The family of the child in question was appealing but I wouldn’t give them the time to wait. I reached for the trap door. I would set things to right. The sentence was passed, the verdict awaited.
There was a knock at the front door.
I ignored it.
The knocking persisted.
Was it the police?
The knocking continued.
I couldn’t ignore it any longer. If it was justice I would face it. I went to the door. I saw her face, pale in the moth circled light bulbed glow, bobbing behind the glass like a severed head floating in an aquarium.
What did she want?
She gawped, mouth opening and closing crazily like she was going to scream. She pounded on the glass until I finally let her in.
“The paperboy,” she shrieked. “My god, the paperboy.”
Ha. I’d almost forgotten about him. I went out to see what I’d done. He was lying under a yew bush like a poorly tossed newspaper. I could see his bicycle, the wheel still lazily spinning. His bones soft and twisted and braided through the bright red framework, the spokes shot through his flesh like a glittering aluminum Sebastian, the wheel still spinning, his hand flickering like a moth, once, once, once.
I am the conduit.
*
It’s a mystery, how things are connected. Like a sky wide marionette. Pull a string in Istanbul and somewhere in downtown Minnesota a puppet jumps. One moment I stood there staring at this woman through glass. She banged on my trailer door at an indecent hour, wondering what could be done about the body of a fallen paperboy.
And just as suddenly she’s sitting at my kitchen table sucking on a mug full of herbal tea, her feet just inches from the trapdoor. I could take her down. I could take her under. I could show her my jars.
What would she think?
She tells me her name but I don’t need to hear it. I can taste her thoughts. Her name is Marilyn. I know. It is the same name as my mother. It is the same name as the girl in high school. Her hair whispers her name to me. It haunts me.
“It was just so horrible. How did that happen? The spokes, they were jammed so deep.”
Her voice tattered away.
“A car hit him,” I said. I tried to say the words with strength. A man with strength can accomplish anything.
“But the way he was twisted. Like rope, like party streamers.”
“Cars hit hard. He was thrown, bicycle and all. You wait and see. That’s what the police will say.”
She looked at her hands. She opened and closed them like they were sore.
“I was looking for my cat. He’d slipped out a window. I thought all of the windows were closed but he slipped through.”
“Cats will slip through anything. He won’t have gone far.”
I don’t think she sees the trapdoor. I can’t be sure. It isn’t something I care to test. What would I do? Ask her? “Do you see that trap door beneath the table?”
She stared at her teacup. “They say we can see the future in these things.”
I shrug. I see the future. I see everything but I can’t tell her that.
“Do you think he’s all right?”
“Who, the boy?”
“No. My cat. Do you think he’s all right.”
“He’s a cat. They’ve got lives to spare, don’t they?”
“What if he’s hurt?”
“The police will watch for him.”
“What if they run him over?”
She stood up abruptly, spilling the pot of tea. It crashed to the floor, shattering in all directions.
“I’m sorry. I should, no, I can’t, I’ve got to go look for my cat,” She’s stammering. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go look for my cat.”
She set her cup upon the table. She was at the door and gone before I could even rise. I walked to the door. She’d left it ajar. I stared out into the emptiness of the night, hearing her footsteps guiltying away.
I closed the door and emptied my cup.
It was bitter.
I stared at the spilled tea, seeping through the open trapdoor.
It was time.
*
The first time seems so long ago. I can see myself sitting there in the darkness at my kitchen table staring at the rock. Sitting there and listening to the trailer breath. There is a soft flutter at the air exchange, rattling the tangled aluminum tinsel that was there to let you know the air was flowing.
I sit in the dark, listening to its steady exhalation.
Aluminum viscera tattering in a manmade breeze.
It is talking to me. I know it is.
I’m thinking bout the rock, coming through my living room window, breaking the urn that held my mother’s ashes.
And then that touch, soft at my leg. Like a cat, stealing close to a dreaming bird. I looked down and there it was. The trapdoor. How could I have missed it? I opened it. An exultant exhale of dank air gusted over me like there was something down there that had been holding its breath for a very long time.
I saw a hole. A black empty void like a mouth. I saw a set of stairs, caligari-ing downwards, handmade and rickety and all askew in a hundred incalculable angles. Was it a basement? Trailers didn’t have basements, did they? Maybe it was a bomb shelter. The fifties weren’t that far away. My chrome table gave witness to that sad tacky fact.
I looked down into a void the color of a hammered bruise. Shadows moved like smoke dreams. I felt it call to me like it needed me, like I was wanted. I took the first step downwards into a dark so utter and complete that it seemed to swallow me whole.
It felt numbing and cool. I listened to the basement whispers, the scuttle of silverfish and regret, came in the darkness. That punk had got inside my house and was snooping in my basement. I heard him tittering, the little bastard.
I picked up the rock. This was self defense. I’d catch him and break his face open. I’d smash his sneering mouth with this rock right between the gap in his teeth.
I stepped down the stairs. The sniggering seemed soft and far away. The light flickered a soft wet greenish black. Like the color of algaed swamp water on a hot summer day.
I stepped down farther.
That’s the first time I saw them. The first time I saw all of the mason jars. I saw hundreds of them lined upon unfinished wooden shelves. I didn’t ask what such an elaborate cellar was doing beneath an aluminum trailer. I just accepted it for what it was. Some voice inside my skull told me not to question its existence. Merely accept. Accept and use.
I picked up one of the jars. It felt cool like a large glass bead.
The snickering was coming from inside the jar. I looked in. I couldn’t see a thing but I could hear him in the depths of the jar, laughing at me. I put the rock inside the jar. I don’t know why I did it. Just one of those absolutely right moments in a man’s life when he knows exactly what needs to be done. I put the rock inside the jar and whispered something part curse and part prayer.
“Rock this,” I whispered. “You stone hearted little
bastard.”
They found him in front of the public library, standing atop a stone park bench. Holding a rock in his hands, high up, like a trophy. His entire body was turned to stone. He’d been petrified, turned into a soft black stone so cool to the touch. Nothing left but his eyes, trapped within the stone and if you touched his wrist you could feel the butterfly tremble of his tight panicked pulse.
That was the first but not the last.
Three years is a long time to live in a trailer park.
*
I stood in the cellar, holding a jar and knowing what to do.
That molester I’d read about. He demanded justice. More than justice. His victims called for nemesis. Retribution. The chickens would come home to roost.
With just a whisper I’d see him torn and rent, flensed down to naked bone and truth, leaving nothing but a goodbye grin, crescent mooning ivory laments. It was a good night’s work but I kept thinking about Marilyn out there in darkness calling for her cat.
I could hear her all the way down here in the cellar, I heard her.
“Here kitty kitty. Here kitty kitty.”
She needed my help.
Do it, the cellar whispered.
Marilyn needed my help.
Do it, the jars whispered.
I looked at the jar in my hand. I thought of tearing off that child molester’s testicles and cramming them into this jar in a single wet pulse. That’s what they were made for. The jars, growing justice and vengeance inside themselves. Nothing but evil could come of them but Marilyn needed my help.
I opened the jar. I pressed my mouth about its rim.
“Here kitty, kitty.”
As I tightened the lid I heard her scream.
*
The staircase had never seemed so long. The screen door, flung wide open and flapping like a broken jawed drawbridge. I rushed out into the darkness. I followed her screams like a salmon following the wet compass of instinct.
She stood in back of her trailer. Her feet, ankle deep in the uncut grass, appeared amputated at my first sight but she wasn’t looking at her feet. She was looking at the cat strewn against the breather on her trailer. It looked like the aluminum beast was trying to inhale a plateful of screaming spaghetti. There were pieces of the cat tattering in a cold midnight breeze, like tinseled trailer court viscera.
She kept on screaming, loudly enough so that I could pretend not to hear the cat’s mutilated yowls.
Here kitty, here kitty.
Damn it.
Marilyn kept on screaming. How could I help her? I stare at her, helplessly. Then I saw it. I saw the creeping shadow made of stains, swimming across her face like long slow sharks, clotting and clouding the perfect pink of her lungs.
Couldn’t she feel it, or was she screaming too loudly? I could see the cancer, already eating through her. I could see it, through her soft perfect skin. Can’t she imagine the pain? Doesn’t she know how hard it will be?
She kept on screaming. There was nothing for it, I had to rescue her. It was something for her own good.
“Come with me!” I shouted, dragging her back to my trailer.
Dragging her back into the kitchen.
I threw the table over. The final teacup shattered.
“Down here.” I commanded. “Down here, Marilyn.”
I put strength into my words. Surely she had to listen to a man with strength.
She looked down at the floor.
“Where?”
“In the cellar.”
“Trailers don’t have cellars.”
“Can’t you see the trapdoor?”
I made her open her eyes. I skinned the lids back with the pressure of my fingerprints, scraping them back like a pair of peeled grapes.
“Look, damn it.”
I forced her to look.
“Oh my god,” she screamed.
She grabbed at her eyes in naked pain.
It must be the cancer.
“Look,” I repeated.
She looked and saw it the trap door through her mutilating pain.
“Down here. I can save you, down here.”
“Save me from what.”
“From the cancer. From the pain of it. God damn it Marilyn, don’t you want to be saved?”
I knew I sounded like some kind of religious maniac but the anger and panic had taken my tongue. I hoped she could see through my confusion and trust my kind extended hand.
“Oh my god.”
I dragged her to the stairs.
“Come on. Come on down stairs.”
“There’s no stairs.”
“They’re hard to see. Look harder.”
I pulled at her eyes with my mind, feeling them pulp beneath my mind’s fingers like a hand full of rotted strawberry preserves.
“Oh my god Marilyn, just come down here with me. I can save you.”
She screamed blindly, loudly, wet tears blubbing down her cheekbones into her wide open mouth.
“My name’s not Marilyn!”
I cannot wait any longer for her to see the light of reason. Women are evil. They must be lead from darkness.
I am the conduit.
We’re in the basement, suddenly, like the blink of a transient dream. I grabbed a jar from the shelf, it unscrewed itself all too easily. I reached my hand into her screaming throat. I felt it soft and wet, a wriggle with teeth, deep down, feeling the soft tissue tearing beneath my manicured nails, rooting brutally, trying to help.
“Oh god, Marilyn, I can feel the cancer, I can feel your pain.”
I reached deeper than arms ought to. I dug my fingers in, catching jellyfish in the grip of wet smoke, yanking, tearing, I ripped it out.
Her screams ended yet I felt them going on in my hands. Long tattered viscerous dreams, shrieks caught in flesh, aching to be let out. I pushed them into the jar, waiting for the soft elusive magic to work.
When the pink red candy nightmare finally faded, I saw what had happened.
What I’d done.
I’m under the trailer in the dirt.
Marilyn or what ever her name was lay before me, naked and pink and torn inside out like the back door of a scream. I hung onto a dirty mason jar. The jar was cracked in one side, and flyblown. A soft residue of something indescribable smeared inside the faded glass.
What had I done?
I saw my mother’s soft green eyes looking up at me from her hospital bed.
“If you wish hard enough…”
What had I done?
I felt the hospital pillow in my hands, my mother’s long sun blonde hair whispering secrets, pushing the pillow down against her mouth, saving her from the cancer, my father standing over me, hand clamped on my thirteen year old shoulder, forcing his will through me.
I am the conduit.
“…dreams come true.”
I knelt in the dirt. I had to. I could not stand. There wasn’t enough room to stand. I was under my floor in a hole that I had hack-sawed through the trailer floorboards. There was never a basement and never a staircase and never any jars.
My father was right.
I belong dead.
She belonged dead.
I reached up for the sky but the aluminum and the sheets of tarpaper roof shingles get in my way.
The table above me where my family so often sat.
The ashes of my mother now poured into a soft and dusty mason jar.
I pulled the trailer down upon myself, reaching up and dragging it down around myself, sealing myself off. My strength was unbelievable. I buried myself alive but it still wasn’t enough punishment. I had to taste my memories, had to taste my fears running down into my mouth.
I pulled the trailer in tighter still.
Tight and clammering hot and rusty, like a heavy tin suit.
The walls, the doors, all of the lines I’d drawn around my life, closing in like a box, like a coffin, like something tighter still. Until there was nothing left. Nothing left but a space smaller than a jar.
And I’m down here screaming in the dirt and the darkness.
I will never stop moving.
I will never stop screaming.
*
The sky was a nightmare scream of candy ink blossoms shouting at the hungry-eyed stars.
The boy ran through the empty field.
He liked the field. It was a good place to play in. He imagined it a jungle, a battlefield, or a magician’s graveyard.
There was a stream running through the field. The water was dirty but it made a happy sound.
The boy knelt before the stream. The water teemed through the algae and the mud, alive with life. Alive with minnows and wrigglers and crayfish and things that had no name. The sunlight glanced off of the surface of the water, coloring it a soft aluminum shade.
The boy saw something glinting down in the cold wet darkness.
He reached his arm down into the mud.
For a moment it felt like a hand, touching his, soft and icy cold and boney thin.
The imaginary hand pressed something into the boy’s grasp.
He pulled it up clear of the muddy darkness.
It was a jar, much like the jars that his mother puts up her jams and jellies in.
He washed it clean in the flow of the running stream and then he ran home to his mother.
“I found a jar,” he chirped. “What should I put in here?”
“What ever you wish,” his mother said, busy with the peeling of carrots and potatoes for the evening stew.
He ran for the front door, happy to be heading back into the heart of his dreams. He slammed it behind himself. He ran for the field and the distant stream to catch him self some pollywogs, running far and fast like a dream of running hoof beats that would never stop moving.
Voodoo Trucker Clucker Futz-up
There is a lot of ways to kill a chicken.
“Did you ever see the like?”
I just nod.
“My God, did you ever see the like?”
I nod again. She looks at me like she's expecting an answer but all I can do is nod, and stare at all the chickens.
I let the gaps fill in my silence.
There are gaps in every conversation. Some think of these gaps as uncomfortable silences but really they're quite comfortable. Just moments of heavenly silence.