by Steve Vernon
My Grandpa Jake once told me that a man’s intestines were fearsome long. He said they stretched for miles if you laid them out just right. He told me of the fakirs of India who would cut a small hole in their stomachs and tie the end of a rope to the end of their intestines and then they’d tootle on a little potbellied flute as the rope wobbled skyward drawing their intestines up with them.
I’m not quite sure just what those fakirs would have to gain by such a maneuver, but that was pretty near exactly what it felt like to me, only instead of skyward I felt the coils of my entrails crawling away from me in slow wet slug-like urges, one pulsing segment at a time.
I wondered if maybe they were crawling home and how long it would take for my entrails to get there and would they maybe lead a troop of marines back to rescue me. I imagined my entrails trailing themselves all the way back to the base, only that wasn’t really home now was it. Perhaps they’d crawl along the bottom of the Pacific, all the way back to Nebraska. Maybe if I had the time to think about it I could have tied a tin can to one end of the gut and made myself into some kind of a human tin-can telephone. I pictured myself talking through a thousand miles of long stretched-out intestine.
“Hello, Grandpa Jake? This is Battle calling. Can you send out an SOS call to that movie dog, Rin-Tin-Tin, if he isn’t currently stuck in a well?”
And then all at once he was there. My Grandpa Jake. I saw him kneeling over me, muttering darkly, naked as the day he’d been born, clothed in nothing but a tatter of scrapbook photographs, a few notes he’d scribbled to himself on the back of his hands, the ink soaked into his blood, and a smile that burned in my memory like a beacon. I wasn’t sure if it was him, or maybe something else just wearing his memory, but there he was all the same.
“You got to cast out your bread upon the water,” Grandpa Jake said, catching hold of my dangled intestine and rolling it back over his fist and his elbow, like a fisherman rolling in a long soggy line.
When my guts were sufficiently coiled up he cast them back out, far into the darkness, and I felt a tugging down deep inside my soul like something slipping away, and then all at once I felt another tug, further off, I felt something tugging hard at the wrong end of my intestines.
*
“Lay down Billy,” I said, easing him up onto the land. “Lay down on the rocks here and try to hang on. Your Grandpa Battle will set things to right.”
I kept my right hand pressed down flat and hard against the open wound. It felt a little like a thin wet mouth, I could feel it sucking and spitting and saying things that I didn’t quite want to listen to.
“Hold still Billy. Hold still and hang on hard. It isn’t time for you to cast off just yet.”
I worked the buttons of my shirt with my left hand, unfastening them one at a time. This was something that I only did in the darkness, usually with my eyes kept closed. I had worn this damn thing for so long, growing it up close to me, yet I still couldn’t quite face it in the mirror or the light.
It had come to me that time on the North Korean battlefield, as the fever dream of my Grandpa Jake worked my insides in and out. I’m not quite sure just how much of that entire experience was real and how much was nothing but a figment of my wounded exhaustion, but something grew onto me out there in the Korean darkness. Something that suckled up onto my open wound and fed me and ate from me and breathed for me and kept me alive. A fungus, fallen from some lonely night sky, colored like no other color I’d ever dreamed, puckering long lacy fingers up through the suck-hole of my belly pipe, reaching up inside me and feeling the current of the heart pumped blood.
“I know you,” it had whispered to something hidden down deep in my soul. “I know you.”
And strange to say I knew it as well. I knew it in the feeling and the hunger of me, the darker dog instincts that howled up a thousand long forgotten trails. I knew of its hunger and I knew of its need and I knew that somehow it would be good for me.
And then I had let that sky fungus grow over my wound and work its way up around into my chest and my heart and my lungs. I don’t know if I let it, or if it just happened to me, but I sure didn’t fight it. It was I needed to stay stuck to this spinning old world, and I carried it through Korea, dodging the medics and the surgeons every chance I could get. It kept me alive and it kept me company and some nights when the Korean moon was talking to the far-off Pacific tide drawing the water in and out, then that strange growing thing that was part and foreign all at once would sing to me. It would sing to me, all soft and lonely, like the wind moving through the memory of a church pipe organ run to rust. I felt a kind of lonely company, a kind of lonely love and it stayed stuck.
You have to eat what you catch in this world, even if it tastes worse.
I picked up that goddamn Kabar knife and I leaned it up against my belly. I had to push hard to work through the coating that the Korean sky fungus had grown over my wounds, working the tip of the knife down through the fibrous coating. The whorls of the sky fungus puckered like lips around the knife, and I felt tears bleeding through the pores of my skin and a voice deep down inside the dark night of my memory whispered that it was all right to hurt someone that you loved.
It did not want to let go. It had known me for far too long, but someone else needed its peculiar sticking gift, far more than I did.
I slid my fingers down along the Kabar knife’s edge, spider-wedging them into the pucker of the wound that had never quite remembered how to heal, hidden beneath the protective caul of the sky fungus. I scraped a bit of it off and sealed it over Billy’s wound and it sucked right onto the hole and held it hard and the rest of it pulled off of me and pulled onto Billy.
The bleeding had stopped for a bit, but I didn’t think I was done just yet. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew that there was something more that needed to be done, a bit more of the spell that wanted to be cast.
I kept working my Kabar knife deeper into the sky fungus. It was a hard go, trying to wedge that wound back open. A part of it didn’t want to come, and a part of it didn’t want to let go, but I had hold of it now, working the coil of my intestines back out from inside me. There was more than meat and tissue, there was memory and experience and dream all woven and wrapped around the long uncoiling ramble of my belly pipe, and I wormed it out link by link and cast it out into the darkness.
I cast it out, again and again, throwing it just as far out into the woods as I could, heaving it back in and coiling it and casting it out again.
“Come on,” I shouted mercilessly. “My boy needs you.”
I didn’t know what I would catch out here in the darkness of the Fence Woods. Maybe it was the spirit of my long lost wife, maybe the memory of some dead dark god swimming out there in the lonely old darkness, maybe it was nothing but a fool’s dream a beggar’s prayer.
I did not know just what would happen.
I did not know what might grow.
And then I felt a nibble and I let it go.
A Hole Full of Nothing
This is how it all went down.
Tommy said it was a good deal and I guess he ought to know what he’s talking about. Street fighting, he said. It’s big money, he said. All we’ve got to do is to burn ourselves a few DVD copies and sell them.
So what do you know about burning, I asked. The last time I looked you needed to read the instructions on a box of strike-anywhere matches.
It’s easy, he told me. I’ve got it all figured out.
Whenever Tommy tells me he’s got things all figured out I start to worry.
Or at least I ought to.
So who’s going to fight, I asked.
You for one, he said. You’re the fighter, aren’t you?
I was afraid he’d say that. People had been telling me I was a fighter ever since that asshole with the braces.
It’s a good idea, Tommy said. We’re going to make us some money.
He keeps saying that word, money, like the ka-ching of a cash register is going to
talk me into it.
Too damn bad for me that he’s probably right.
Tommy’s always right. I think when he gets older he ought to run for prime minister or something higher. Marked for greatness, that’s what my dad would say. Well, actually my dad used to say that Tommy was a walking piece of something that had probably crawled from out of the wrong hole in his momma’s gearbox and maybe he ought to crawl on back and simmer a little while longer until he’s cooked all the way through. Since then my dad’s opinion of Tommy has slid a little downhill and puddled around his ankles like a pair of worn out boxer shorts. Gravity worked, I guess, even though my dad didn’t anymore.
I told Tommy what my dad said but Tommy only said that my dad ought to watch out for what he said or else he’d learn a lesson from his betters. I’m not sure which betters Tommy was talking about and Tommy never got around to elaborating upon that threat. Anyway, my dad is still talking and I’m still waiting for Tommy to teach dad a thing or two, like maybe how to clean Tommy’s blood from off of my dad’s knuckles if Tommy ever works up the nerve to try.
He won’t. Tommy’s not a fighter. I’m the fighter. Everybody at school knows that. Tommy’s a talker and a dreamer. That’s different from being a fighter. A fighter goes and gets what he wants while a talker just stands around and tries to talk somebody else into getting it for him.
I will show them all, Tommy said. I’m going to make myself a mark.
Yeah right, is what I think, but I don’t say it out loud so as not to hurt Tommy’s feelings. You don’t hurt your friend’s feelings, not if you wanted to keep them feeling friendly. That was tricky with Tommy. With Tommy there were two kinds of people, him and them. As far as Tommy was concerned the whole world was trying to gang up on him and his only chance was to screw them first.
I didn’t think like that. Not much, anyways. Besides, Tommy never followed through on any of his threats or honored any of his promises. Tommy was way too busy dreaming. He always had one kind of a plan or another cooking on the backburner.
Last year he was going to make a fortune stealing wire and stripping it down to sell to the scrap metal dealer. Tommy made about seven bucks before shorting out the town’s power supply and damn near electrocuting himself in the process. He charred off his fingerprints and I think that was the only thing that kept him from getting caught.
This year it was fighting.
It is just like that Ultimate Fighting, Tommy said. Folks will pay a lot to see that sort of shit on DVD.
Folks like who, I asked.
Folks like everybody, Tommy said. Everybody around here from Yarmouth to Shelburne is bound to want to own a copy and watch it. What else is there to watch around here? The ocean?
He had a point. This far out in the boonies even tired old Yarmouth seemed exciting. Where we lived there was nothing much to do but stare at the waves running in and out, always reaching and never quite getting, and that got old pretty fast.
I threw a rock out into the water. It made a splash and a gulp sound like a bullfrog hop. The rock made a hole in the water, sank straight down and the hole filled in. If the whole process had a deeper meaning I don’t know what it was. It just passed the time, is all.
Passing time passes for fun and excitement here in the unwiped asshole of lower Nova Scotia. The town has got a name but nobody ever uses it. Who needs a name in a dump like this? A rose by any other name still stank of the horseshit you planted it in. About the only thing to do around here is drive through and there isn’t much of that going on since they up and moved the highway.
They passed us by, my dad would rant. Cut us off and passed us by, hoping we’d rot away like a tied off leg.
Right dad. Ottawa itself has declared war on this little craphole of a town.
Tommy kept on talking. We’ll make some money, he said for the fifteenth time. We’ll make our mark. People will be talking about us all over Nova Scotia. Hell, they’ll be talking all across Canada.
You sure about that Tommy, I asked.
Sure I’m sure. People love mixed martial arts.
The way he said it sounded like a mixed drink or maybe mixed nuts and I wondered if Tommy really knew what he was talking about.
Name somebody, I said.
Lots of people like it. They like it because it’s so different all of the time. You’ve got your wrestling and your jujitsu and you tae-kwan-do. It’s like an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet.
Right, I said. All the pizza you can eat. That’s some kind of variety you’re talking about.
Tommy doesn’t appreciate sarcasm much. He glared at me like my IQ-ometer had fallen by about sixty-eight degrees.
Don’t you ever watch Spike television, he asked.
Now Tommy knew damn well my family couldn’t afford cable television, not since the fish plant shut down. Dad used to bring home pretty good money when he worked there but nowadays he just sits at the kitchen table sipping on a luked-over cup of tea. I think the luked-over tea started as a way to save on tea bags but the whole thing had become a kind of a habit and a ritual for my dad. He’d get about fifteen cups a day out of a single tea bag, just refilling the cup over and over onto the sogged out tea bag.
And while he sipped he’d rant. My dad was a champion class ranter. I think he practised ranting in the garage when nobody was listening. It was kind of like he was warming up for something, like shadow-boxing with his mouth, only I never really have figured out just what dad was getting ready for. Some war that had never been declared, I guess.
The fish are still out there, dad would say, but the goddamn government won’t let us fish them. They let those foreign factory ships gut the sea clean clear empty while hardworking fisherman sit on the docks, fartless and broke.
That’s about all that dad does these days, sipping tea and staring down towards the harbour and cursing the goddamn factory ships. I don’t even know if there are any factory ships out there but the way that dad talks they must look something like Darth Vader’s Death Star and they’re manned by zombie mutant gerbils and they must be about as toxic as the bubonic plague.
About the only other thing my dad does these days is go out to the Seven-Eleven to buy himself some smokes and scratch and win tickets.
That and the tea, which dad never did learn to like.
A man can’t even afford himself a decent drink these days, dad complained. No beer, no rum and no whiskey. Nothing but lukewarm piss-thin tea, day after goddamn day, you talk about living shit-poor in a damn hard old spot.
Talking with my dad does wonders for my vocabulary. No wonder I failed English last year. I don’t get it. It was that last essay that did it. I figure I don’t know what that teacher was so pissed about. Fuck’s a word, isn’t it? Anyway, what are they doing teaching English in our schools? We live in Canada, don’t we? We ought to be learning to speak Canadian.
I already know all I need to know about speaking Nova Scotian. I didn’t need to go to school for that. There’s a rhythm to speaking Nova Scotian, that’s got a little of the ebb tide and the mud flats and that feeling that you get when your best girl tells you that she just wants to be friends. Nova Scotian words are mostly spelled out in multiples of four letters and when it came to four letter words my dad was a mathematical wizard.
Why don’t you go look for a job, dad asked me the other day. We could sure use the money.
Why don’t you go look for one yourself, was what I thought, but I knew better than to say it out loud.
That’s my plan, I said.
I did have myself a plan, you understand. I figured I would get myself into trade school and maybe become a plumber or an electrician. I had heard that both of these professions paid pretty damn well and that kind of appealed to my way of thinking.
I’ve got to finish high school first, I said to dad. Then maybe go to trade school and make something out of myself.
Dad snorted like he was trying to back-swallow a head cold. Trade school takes money, he said, and you don�
�t have any.
He had a point.
Okay dad, so maybe you’re right. So maybe I’ve been looking for work on the internet.
He cocked his eyebrow at me, raising it high and arched like a woolly caterpillar rainbow.
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing but a whole lot of nothing on the internet, dad said. Mind you, my dad still thinks that websites are places where spiders hang their hats.
So what do you know about the internet, I asked.
I know what I need to goddamn know, he said. I looked on the internet once and I couldn’t find anything more than a load of women taking their bikinis off. I looked for hours, he said. I wasted a whole morning.
I bet he did. It takes a lot of time to run a keyboard one-handed.
There are a ton of jobs on the internet, I said. You just have to look is all. I knew one guy he got himself a good government job just by looking on the internet.
A good job, eh? So what’s he do?
He looks on the internet, I said. He’s a researcher.
I made that whole story up about looking for work on the internet and dad knows it but he sure can’t prove it. I don’t imagine he’ll even try. The best he can do is just sit there at the kitchen table, hunched down over his scratch and win tickets, scratching off the rows of spaces with the edge of a penny. His knuckles are as white as a nun’s left ass cheek from squeezing that penny so hard. The dust from the scratch tickets piled up on the table top and worked into his fingers. It went nicely with the nicotine stains tattooed on his knuckles and the tea mug haloes etched on the table top.
Where’s mom, I asked.
Bingo, dad said.
Throwing money away is what I think but all I asked dad was - did she win yet?
She won last month, dad said, like he’s proud of her. Her shining moment, winning two hundred dollars, not bad for a night’s work.
Actually, she won the money two months ago. And those two hundred dollars were spent by last month, on this month’s Bingo cards. I might be flunking English but I can still do the math better than dad can. My dad doesn’t think numbers count for all that much. In fact my dad’s mental calendar has been running a little slow lately. He blames it on living here in the Maritimes.