Sip

by Brian Allen Carr

  Raised like that, the boy grew irksome. Once able, he would decamp and run ungoverned through the world, vandalizing whatever he could.

  The older women soldiers called him Huck Finn—all old books were curses to them. When he showed up black eyed and shadowless, no one was surprised. They drugged the boy and hacked off his leg. Legless addicts seemed to behave better, but he remained a little asshole.

  Three soldiers were enlisted as his chaperones. They were flunkies in the ranks. Mole, the most senior member, had been caught crying on the battlefield. Jilly was such a profane and reckless soldier her superiors half thought her a man in disguise. Baby Boo was new to service, and, like all recruits, had taken a yearlong vow of silence to show her loyalty to the cause.

  They all hated their job.

  “Man, I tell you what,” Jilly said, “I’d cut the little fucker’s head off and bury it in sand. Blow torch that sand into glass, take the rest of his body drizzle it with honey and set that on an ant hill, poison them fucking ants once they ate him up.” She looked like she’d eat a lightbulb on a dare. She had only recently completed her year of silence and seemed always to be making up for lost conversation.

  “You talk too much,” said Mole. She had patient, hospitable eyes. She had heart in her voice. But she had also stomped a brain out a skull before. Glared down at the gray matter twinkling in the sunshine, proudly.

  “Shit, I ain’t said a fucking thing in a year or nothing. Kept my tongue stuck to my teeth and didn’t even whisper shit into my pillow like Baby Boo do. Forgive me if my mouth gets to going free, but I assume you was the same way when they told you you could talk again.”

  “You talk this much before?”

  “If I had something worth saying I’d say it and no one could tell me not to unless they wanted more than just words with me, and then I’d oblige them on that front too, cause I ain’t never been afraid of nothing except sharks and roaches, and I don’t get in the ocean and I shake my shirts and shoes before I wear ’em.”

  They trailed the redhead’s wayward destruction, dragging him back to the Founder every so often just to prove that the boy was alive, and it was a thankless gig they had.

  They followed him in a patient way. The faster they caught him, the sooner they’d lose him again. They’d corral him on home to see his mother, and she’d look at him absently and the cycle began anew.

  He was lost, and they were after him.

  “We had a crazed steer that my mom cut the balls off. Maybe that would help this fucker to calm. When we catch him again let’s try it.” Jilly was chomping chewing gum that she’d pilfered from some ruined town they’d passed through. She blew bubbles on occasion. Smacked and popped like as if for attention.

  “You had a crazed bull,” said Mole. The two walked side by side, didn’t make eye contact when they spoke. Up ahead, Baby Boo moved in silence.

  “Don’t tell me what the fuck I had. I was there, I saw it.”

  “It’s logistics,” Mole said. “Bulls got balls, steers do not. Y’all made him a steer.”

  Jilly popped a bubble. “Well, let’s make this little fucker a steer then.”

  “I don’t know we can.”

  “Sure we can. We’ll tell his mom he caught his nuts on whatever, that it wasn’t us did it per se. ‘We found him that way, ma’am,’ I’ll tell her. Keep the things in a jar just in case he wants to hold ’em as mementos.”

  “It’s not that. And we’re not supposed to say she’s his mom.” Mole took a tube of salve from her pocket, dabbed a bit on her palm, rubbed her face with it, offered some to Jilly.

  Jilly scowled at the stuff. “Fuck no.” She blew a bubble.

  “What I mean is, you cut the nuts off a bull, it’s a steer. Cut the nuts off a boy, I don’t know what it becomes.”

  “It becomes better than it was.”

  They came to a long-dilapidated paint store, its front windows recently broken open. There were tracks in the dirt. One shoe print, one peg poke. Jilly dropped down on her knees to eye them. “A few days back I reckon.”

  The odor of the place was noxious. “We’re looking for paint,” Mole said. “Let’s go before the fumes melt our brains.”

  Outside, Jilly held out her hand. “I changed my mind. Give me some of that shit you rub on your face.”

  “Not unless you ask nice.”

  “Fuck it then.”

  They walked on, came to a building less than a half block away and on it was a crudely painted skull with hashtags for eyes.

  Jilly spat at it. “Only something with nuts would’ve ever painted that.”

  Haircut

  Bale woke on the couch again, but this time the house stood still. He was back in his teensy shorts, his itty-bitty V-neck. He cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes, stretched his hands—the crisscross of veins and tendons, the knuckles. He made fists, jabbed the air. Rolled his head, cracked his neck. Got up, his shirt riding up over his belly button. He walked to the stereo as Murk had done the day before but had never worked one and didn’t want to upset it. He peeked in the kitchen—empty. He headed to the bathroom and took a piss. The plumbing worked on well water, you could tell by the smell of it. The same sort of mineral stench of the water they had behind the train. The bowl of the toilet thick with deposits where the water line rose to. There must have been a windmill pump around and Bale credited Mira’s deceased father with its install. Maybe they were plumber’s clothes that he wore the previous day. Behind the train they had a few turbines. They had cisterns for the crops, but it so rarely rained that they needed the wells. Bale wondered how the crops were doing. He didn’t know much about what they’d planted, but every so often he’d turn his binoculars on the rows, try to calculate the plants’ growth.

  “Mira,” he called out after washing his hands, stepping out the bathroom. “Mira.”

  Nothing. He went to the front door. His hand on the knob of the thing, he thought about what Murk said. The Doors? Had he heard them? The album cover. The haircut.

  Bale scrubbed at his hair. For the first time in his whole life, he could decide how to cut it. In the dome administrators decided all that, and the administrators were never unseated. If they died, their offspring supplanted them. They figured the less choices you made the better. But now, Bale could choose.

  He opened the door, and Mira stood in the sun in her short robe tending her mother. She set a finger to her lips—Bale liked when she shushed him—whispered when she got near. “Woke up early to get her a shadow so she’d sleep. You okay?” Mira stepped back into the house and Bale followed, ogling where her shadow should be.

  “I’m fantastic,” he said.

  “I was gonna make agua de jamaica, ever had it?”

  “Huh-what?”

  “It’s hibiscus flowers. Like tea. But I’ve never had tea. Just read about it in books. You ever had tea?”

  “No. But I’ve had coffee and I think that’s sort of like tea.”

  “Maybe. You’ll like this. It’s pink.”

  “Great,” said Bale. “It’ll match how my shorts make me feel.” He held his hands out like a performer, tried to grin all his charm. “I got a question.”

  “Okay.” They went to the kitchen and Mira did her banging around thing—began to heat water, dragged down a container of dried flowers.

  “Will you cut my hair?”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I don’t think so. Do you?”

  Mira took two white mugs from the cabinet and set them on the counter. They didn’t quite match, but it was close. “I’ve never seen you any other way.”

  “Me either,” said Bale. “That’s the point.”

  Mira went to him. “What would you want?”

  “I think something kind of different. Know what a Mohawk is? You cut off all this.” He covered the sides of his head with hi
s hands. “Just leave the strip on the top.”

  “I know what a Mohawk is.”

  “Can you do one?”

  She passed her fingers through his hair, and the kettle hissed steam. She plucked the thing from the stove, poured hot water in the mugs. “I think. But first let’s drink this.”

  Drummond Unwinding

  Through the pierced roof, Drummond watched a redheaded boy climb through the refuse. He carried a paint can and brush and he marked skulls on any flat surface he saw. There seemed a comedy in his movements. Drummond decided to appeal to him.

  “You there,” Drummond called, and his voice shocked the painter, and the painter came to him.

  “What’s that?” He looked like the kind of boy who’d kick a kitten.

  “I’m trapped. Could you lend a hand?”

  The painter scratched his head, touched the sheet metal before him, pulled the brush from his bucket and began to paint. “What’s in it for me?”

  Drummond thought. “Well, I’m naked. I got nothing. So . . . gratefulness.”

  “You got something.”

  Drummond checked his naked body. “What’s that?”

  “A shadow. I’ll let you out of there if you give it to me.”

  “Give it to you?”

  “Let me drink it off the ground.” The painter stepped back from the hole through which he and Drummond spoke, found his shadow. “Watch,” he said. Then he set his paint bucket on the dirt, lowered himself and drank. When he raised up, his eyes were black. He winked one of them at Drummond and made his head balloon twice its size, his eyes spread out like saucers. He laughed a thin laughter, resumed normal form.

  Drummond said, “Fuck.”

  The painter took his bucket back in hand. “If you don’t like the conditions, you’re free to free yourself.” He determined the sun’s line. “You’ll get a shadow in there eventually. Swallow it, slip through that hole.” He marked more with his brush.

  Drummond sat on his bare ass, “Thanks anyhow,” he said, his voice echoing out into the air.

  “No problem.”

  More Disaster

  He could smell it before anything. He could taste the ash in the air. The gunpowder. The murder. Tears came to his eyes. In his earliest darkened state, he was much like a child. If a whim presented itself, and then was not fulfilled, his emotions tattered and blew piecemeal like shrapnel. Nostalgia stirred deep in his soul, a piteous ache. This train was his thing.

  As he approached, he whispered invocations, pleading with whatever existent deity there might be that his senses deceived him.

  He stumbled forward. His teeth clattered in his mouth. His blackened-out eyes nervous in their sockets.

  When he got there, it looked like a snake pulled from its coil and thrashed against a boulder until dead, left to fall where it would. A kind of horror struck him.

  Murk slowpoked his way on. He felt filthy and grief-stricken. Doleful and smote. He half wished he believed in some true God to appeal to. Once his mother had told him of God, but on her deathbed she’d laughed off the idea.

  “Sure,” she gleamed. “Up there,” she pointed. “A man who looks out for all this.” She wanded her hand toward the catastrophe of existence. And ever since then Murk was sure humanity stood indefensible.

  Murk walked toward the train, the shadow poison inside him.

  Breezed ash drifted across the scape. Motes of char curled into braids. Murk dragged onward into the oppressive imagery, the frightening reality of it. Train cars were heaped catawampus, willy-nilly. Cockeyed corpses clung to knotted wads of rubbish. Dross seemed the standard. An obscure crackling preached out from the myriad fires dwindling. The stained smell of death lingered. The hollow feel of defeat or doom.

  Murk turned aft, and, in the distance, he saw a little person perched near one of the toppled train cars marking the side of the thing with a crudely painted skull. Hashtags for eyes. His hair red. And Murk called out to him, “You.” At that, the redhead dropped his paintbrush and gave flight. His movements recognizable to Murk. The redhead had a false leg.

  Murk gave chase. The two amputees hobbling in oddball fashion—one fleeing, one in pursuit. And, as they moved, Murk continued to call. “Stop. Stop. I only got questions.” This, however, was a lie. Murk had a rage that needed placing. He had questions as well, but he figured he could twine the things together.

  Murk, larger than his prey, of longer stride, immediately gained. “I’m gonna catch you eventually.”

  “Tongue my ass,” cried the redhead.

  “Just as soon as you quit moving.”

  They dragged away from the dilapidated train, into a prairie pocked with cactus and Mexican palmettos. It was a hokey-dokey kind of chase that resulted in Murk grabbing a tuft of the painter’s red hair from behind, dragging him to the earth and holding him to it.

  “You’re just a boy,” said Murk, and the child spat at him. Murk punched him twice in the face, and black blood erupted from his nose, his dark eyes winced.

  He ballooned himself then, and the expansion of his body forced Murk from his frame, and the boy rose, his skin sprawled into that configuration only shadow addicts could achieve, and he tarried forward with the wind, the breezes pushing him along like a sail, but Murk stood and puffed up as well, his distended form also propelled by gusts, and the bloated monopods slipped across the landscape like discarded tissues, huffing along in rapid heaves.

  Again Murk’s size afforded him an advantage. Through the grainy world they flew, but Murk overtook the boy, wrapped him in his clutches, dragged him to the grass and yanked off his false leg. The boy laid back, deflated, and Murk stood above him holding the wood leg like a club.

  “What do you want?”

  “Heard about you,” said Murk, and he slipped back to true form. “You’re a thief.”

  The boy laughed fake laughter.

  “What happened to the train?”

  “Got what was coming to it?” The boy dabbed then at his bloody nose.

  “You did all that?”

  “Look at me. That was an army. A great army led by a great leader that did that.”

  Murk eyed him. He was a fragile thing, but he was proud. “You know Jessup?”

  The boy shrugged. “Might.”

  “He’s got a theory ’bout you.”

  “Who gives a shit?”

  “A friend of mine,” Murk said. Then he brought the leg down on the boy’s skull and the boy’s face went oblong. Murk swung again and the boy’s eye socket sunk, vomited out the eyeball, the thing belching open. Murk swung again and the whole thing chopped through, opened up. Revealed a blackened brain that slunk out from the breakage. Murk brought the leg down again and it slurped into the stew of his used-to-be head.

  He raised it, the peg leg. Looked at the black bloodstain, which slowly grew in color, made its way back to crimson. It seemed to glow beneath the pale blue sky above. Murk mulled over the dead thing at his feet. It reminded him so much of himself, he couldn’t help but hate it.

  Bale the Shade Trader

  Earlier that morning, before Bale’s haircut, Mira had asked her mother who’d done it. “Your shadow?” Mira said, “the man? Who was he?”

  “I had it once,” her mother said. She pointed to the ground. “It was right here.”

  “I know where it would be if you had it, and I was with you before it was gone and there when it was taken.”

  “You were?”

  Mira’s eyes seemed to slice her mother’s throat. “Maybe you need more sleep.”

  “Weren’t you bringing me something? From a gull?”

  “I tried yesterday. Couldn’t find one.”

  “Endless water,” her mother said. “It’s a beautiful rest. Refreshing.”

  “She’s jobbing you,” said Bale.

  “If I bring
you a gull shadow,” Mira asked, “will you remember?”

  Mira’s mother frowned. “Couldn’t hurt,” she said.

  Bale and Mira went out looking. Somehow, his Mohawk made Bale’s clothes seem more his own—they intentionally fit snug.

  Mira and Bale chattered as they hunted.

  “We had cats in the dome,” Bale said. “I always wondered what they were thinking.”

  “They’re assholes,” Mira told him. “They think riddles.”

  “But you can talk to them.”

  “I guess. I mean, I don’t ever take away much from it.”

  “We kept them so they’d eat rats. Ever talked to a rat?”

  They had made way into a field thick with cactus that they had to weave carefully through. “No,” said Mira.

  “Snake?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the animal best to talk with?”

  “Usually people,” Mira said.

  “Usually?”

  “Sometimes they ask too many questions.”

  At noon, they stopped to eat cornbread with goat-milk butter. They sat in the shade of a grapefruit tree, the fruit too green to pick. “These are good when they’re ripe,” said Mira. “And they’ll be ripe soon. Used to, this whole area was used for farming them. There’d be rows and rows, for miles, my dad said. They’re bitter and sweet and sting your lips, but in a good way.”

  Inch-long thorns protruded from the limbs. “Looks mean. Smells nice though.”

  “Thorns are to keep away the rats.”

  “Which you’ve never talked to.”

  Mira chewed on bread. “I have. I’ve swallowed rat shadow. I’ve talked to them. Not a source of pride, I don’t guess.”

  “Is that one?” Bale asked. In the sky, a gray bird circled passively.

  Mira dropped her cornbread in the dirt, pounced to her feet and was running. “C’mon,” she hollered, and Bale followed her, the two sprinting toward the bird.