by Brad Watson
But he’d gone into the wrong room, maybe even some other motel. The beds were made, the television off. His son wasn’t there. The sliding glass door to the balcony stood open. Loomis felt his heart seize up and he rushed to the railing. The courtyard was dark and empty. Over in the lobby, the lights were dimmed, no one on duty. It was all shut down. There was no breeze. No roar of rushing vehicles from the 5, the roar in Loomis’s mind canceling it out. By the time he heard the sound behind him and turned to see his son come out of the bathroom yawning, it was too late. It might as well have been someone else’s child, Loomis the stranger come to steal him away. He stood on the balcony and watched his son crawl back onto the bed, pull himself into a fetal position, close his eyes for a moment, then open them. Meeting his gaze, Loomis felt something break inside him. The boy had the same dazed, disoriented expression he’d had on his face just after his long, difficult birth, when the nurses had put him into an incubator to rush him to intensive care. Loomis had knelt, then, his face up close to the incubator’s glass wall, and he’d known that the baby could see him, and that was enough. The obstetrician said, “This baby is very sick,” and nurses wheeled the incubator out. He’d gone over to his wife and held her hand. The resident, tears in her eyes, patted his shoulder and said, for some reason, “You’re good people,” and left them alone. Now he and their child were in this motel, the life that had been their family somehow dissipated into air. Loomis couldn’t gather into his mind how they’d got here. He couldn’t imagine what would come next.
Ordinary Monsters
The Bodies
The bodies were posed as speakers, lovers, discus throwers, runners awaiting the starter’s gun, as models for artists or medical students, one breast, say, removed of its skin but for the nipple, a penis flayed down one side, scrotum as if it were never there—eyelids severed, noses sheared, abdominal walls peeled away in layers, and hearts, intestines, livers, kidneys there like fruits dried on the vine.
In another room there were glass cases in which millions of blue and red capillaries floated like strange galaxies captured, reduced to the size and shape of human bodies—what worlds operated in there, now?
The man and his son strolled through the exhibit as if through a gallery of art.
The son seemed disinterested, bored. Embarrassed by the sexual organs, at this delicate age of his own development? Or by the other visitors’ intense and open interest? Embarrassed, perhaps, for these people, who were once Chinese, who were once the unnamed and newly dead, who perhaps were prisoners or the inhabitants of a village, caught in the path of war. No one knew or was saying. Even the man felt somehow embarrassed to be alive among them, and he sympathized with his son’s discomfort. He and the boy’s mother had been divorced for only a year, and the man did not know very well just what the boy carried about in his mind and heart.
They came to a woman sliced the length of her body into four standing, parallel slabs, separated only by inches. The boy stood looking fiercely away. He glared at someone in a group that walked past them to another part of the exhibit.
As they left and walked out into the park, the boy said in an angry undertone, Did you see that woman looking at you?
What woman? the man said.
That woman, the boy said. You didn’t see her?
I was looking at the bodies, the man said. Weren’t you?
It was disgusting, the boy said, though he didn’t explain or say what or why.
Intermission
Her scent blossomed in the car like heavenly polecat, like flowers manufactured in a tire plant, something dusky and nostril-stinging, like perfumed coal dust, dead rose blossoms on hot oil-grimed engine blocks. She smacked her Spearmint in something like meditation and I didn’t know if we’d make it to the old theater or not. We drove down the near-empty wide lanes of Twenty-second Avenue, over the bridge, the heavy, sooted freights chugging by underneath, into the heart of town—silent and thrumming like hummingbirds, our hearts. Or maybe it was just me. I turned onto Eighth and pulled up beneath the marquee, the bright light slashing through the windshield, cutting her body in half. She pursed her glossy, strawberry lips, leaned toward me, and took my hand. I was trembling. Ever have a woman kiss the palm of your hand? No, she didn’t. She closed my fingers over the little ball of gum. Toss that out the window for me, baby. I wish she hadn’t looked up right then. Her eyes, between sticky spiked lashes, some kind of deep neon green. Her hair smelled of exotic salts at the roots. Her tongue like a blind, hairless, nursing mammal in my mouth.
The car was rolling, horns blaring, that bending sound going by. I was bent into Mona, I could feel the back of my leg against the wheel, steering somehow, I don’t know where. Folks shouting. It was like church. She was kicking, with those wild pointed shoes, big holes in the headliner. She made sounds like a peacock crying, Aye! Aye! Aye!
I don’t know how far we idled down Eighth. I don’t know how many folks we ran up over the curb. I don’t know how many cops they called out to run down the ’62 Bonneville driving itself down the road. I don’t know, the jailer said one cop called over the radio, Look like it’s being drove by a big hairy ass to me.
I don’t know how long I’ll be in here. I can see all that from the top of the county jail, the long stretch of Eighth Street, west. I can see the flickering sign of the Davis Grill, where I was going to take her to eat. I can see the marquee on the old theater there. I think I can see her sometimes, that plump-legged, kind of pigeon-toed waddle, her nylons going whish-whish, see her actually make it inside the place with some more restrained type of guy. I can see all the way south to Bonita, where her little white house sits on top of the hill. I can see other cars pull in there and, the next morning, leave. I can see the lights go on in the hallway, the kitchen, the bedroom, and out.
Her Tribe
She hadn’t been to the grove since high school, when they used to meet there before home room to smoke dope. Years ago. Before all of that, before everything since.
It was a holiday now, summer vacation. The oaks, sweetgums, and maples, strong-limbed, were in full foliage. She stood in the lower area, where a creek once went through maybe, before the school was there, ages ago, before town even came out this far. When this was the country.
A breeze, cooled in the shade down there, rattled the dense, waxy leaves of the water oaks. She closed her eyes, let her head fall back, felt the breeze on her open neck. She had almost drifted off when she felt the breeze drop even lower in temperature, as if it had passed over water, over the imagined, once-present creek down below, and she opened her eyes in surprise. That’s when she saw them, moving through the higher branches, coming into the grove down near the Vocational Building.
She thought, impossibly—apes. Gorillas. But they were pale, leaner. Muscled, she could tell even from this distance. But leaner. Hairless baboons. She crouched down, put a hand to the damp dead leaves on the ground to steady herself. She couldn’t see faces. Mostly, their sweeping, graceful movement from limb to limb. Through the gaps in between trees, she saw one, three, more make looping leaps from one tree to another. She began to hear noises, like grunts, croaking noises. She heard, as quiet as fingertips wisping over paper, the sound of their hands grasping, swinging on, and releasing the limbs. The slap of the palms grasping another. The faint creak of the limbs with their weight.
Then they were above her, and stopped. The silence in the trees’ canopy like the silence between one beautifully discrete moment and the next. Between two people, when one has just admitted to something awful, and everything is about to change, or already has.
She could see them, perched there, on limbs, in the crooks of larger trees, looking down at her. None of them moved, their eyes on her, their mouths set in something between alarm and anticipation.
Their chests, hairless, concave, muscled. Their hands broad and long-fingered. Their feet, curled over the tree limbs, enormous, the only parts of them apart from their heads on which she could see
hair. Their penises seemed very small, but maybe that was just the distance up into the trees. Or maybe they were that way from exertion. That was true, wasn’t it? She tried to remember the way the young boys looked when she swam in the cold creek with them, when she was a girl.
They were clean-shaven. Or perhaps just beardless. The hair on their heads cropped short, like crew cuts, like boys.
But they were unquestionably men.
She saw their wide, thin-lipped mouths begin to move, and a sound like a high-tenor wind through the trees came from them. They were singing something.
She dared not move or make a sound. She would never forgive herself if she spooked them, if they startled and swung away from her, to some other lost place, never to return.
Going Down
Pearl and Frank had just knocked off their third scotches, Pearl punching at the little call button, when the plane began to go down.
Oh, fuck it all, said Pearl, I cannot go through this sober.
You’ve always given up too easily, said Frank.
The plane, its right wing sheared at the base, spun down through the storm like a one-leaf clover, violently weightless, a falling rumba aflame.
An unstrapped baby flew by, astonished.
There goes your silly dream, muttered Pearl.
A rocketing service cart took out Frank’s left arm, but he managed to snatch two little bottles with his right.
You’ll have to unscrew the tops, dear, he roared to Pearl. I am, as usual, indisposed.
I’m not disinclined, averred Pearl, pouring them over their watery ice.
And out their little oval window they could see, snicking by every two seconds or so, the silvery surface of the Earth where they had celebrated the long and bitter pursuit of their love.
Wild, Wild Pigs
The hunters hung the boar by the heels, sliced it gut to sternum, let fall the beautiful entrails onto the ground. They removed skin, hooves, packed the head in ice, carried it and the meat back to camp. Every evening, the pigs gathered in stealth at the edges of firelight, watching the revelers drinking, roasting, slathering jowls with barbequed wild pig grease. They weren’t feeling so wild, anymore. They began to believe the hunters would never go away, not until they had killed, gutted, skinned, eaten every wild pig in the world.
They went to the holy sow for advice, roused her from the mud hole from which, as long as any of them could remember, only her old gray snout had protruded. The holy sow stumped around awhile, blinking gouts of mud from her eyes. She sent them into the forest to gather the roots of a certain strange plant. When they brought them to her, she grunted twice and wolfed down every last tuber.
A moment later, standing very still, a look of dull anticipation in her smallish red eyes, the holy sow disappeared, poof, she vanished.
The pigs ran screaming and squealing into the woods, certain that they were all quite doomed.
That night, however, the holy sow appeared to the hunters in their dreams. One by one the hunters rose and sleepwalked down various animal trails into the woods. They walked into bottomless swamp mud holes and sank. They happened upon and were devoured by packs of wild, rangy, slobbering dogs. They walked into the river and floated on their backs downstream, out of sight.
The pigs rejoiced, got drunk on fermented berries, fell asleep. But that night, they dreamed of their brethren turned and blackened on spits, the meat smoked tender and tangy and sweet, and woke up the next morning murderous, blind, ravenous with unspeakable lust for their own kind.
Ordinary Monsters
The worst part of it is the stiffness. I can hardly turn my head at all, my neck’s like a birch stump. And the arms, just filled with lead, or concrete, concrete that’s about halfway dry, you know what I mean.
Of course, like a lot of the dead, I’m walking around with this embarrassingly insistent boner. Gets out of my trousers all the time, since they’ve gotten a little ragged, and with the stiff arms and hands, yeah, hard to maneuver it back in.
Good thing we don’t have much sense of humor, I’d be getting ragged all the time. There’s a sense of humor, but it’s bogged into the stiffness, too. I’d be ragging the other guys, if I could. Worse, we’ve all these boners, but none of us really wants to jump the bones. All we crave is flesh, yeah. I remember being so much in love, I wanted to devour my lover. I remember how that was just an idea.
When we were all in that farmhouse, seeking the flesh, shuffling around, guys knocking each other and the women with their rods, I couldn’t help but think—I used to be a professor, when I was alive—this is so much like a faculty party: everybody looking, on the make, nobody with the goods to carry it off, can’t find a drink to save your life.
Oh, ha, that’s a good one. I’d like to laugh about that.
Because there we were, you know, shuffling around, these blank expressions on our faces—the faces are quite stiff, as well—like people who can’t even figure out their own ideas, can’t even find a seat to sit down in and get out of the way.
And there’s one of us, a woman, somehow lost her clothes. The only naked creature in the room. I think she used to be a stay-home mom, what they used to call a housewife. And I’m wondering, what was she doing naked, when she died? Taking a shower? About to get into bed with her husband, make a little suburban whoopee before the kids woke up from their naps? Running around in the yard, out of her mind, tearing her hair, when a lightning bolt or an early aneurism knocked her down?
It could’ve been anything. We were all just normal people, before we changed. Pretty much locked into our lives.
Carl’s Outside
I WAS OUT ON THE FRONT PORCH WHEN THE PHONE began to ring. An orange sunset was bleeding into the sky across the street, and I didn’t want to leave it. But Lanny was busy with supper so I went inside and answered the phone.
A Mr. Secrist from Carl’s school introduced himself.
“Is anything wrong?” I said.
“Well, we’ve been a little worried about Carl,” Mr. Secrist said. “He hasn’t been himself.” He paused. I didn’t say anything. “He’s been getting into fights, falling asleep in class. Nothing we haven’t been able to handle, you know, but it’s not like Carl.”
There was an awkward pause. Then Mr. Secrist went on.
“Anyway, this morning Carl fought—argued—with his teacher, Miss Fortenberry, and I just thought I’d call and let you know she had to send him to the principal’s office.”
“I see,” I said.
“Carl is normally such a quiet, well-mannered boy,” Mr. Secrist said. “I mean, I know Carl, everybody at school knows Carl, he’s a great kid. I just thought I’d call and tell you, in case it’s something you might understand and, you know, deal with better than we could.” He was choosing his words carefully. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I think I know what’s troubling Carl. We can talk to him.”
“I don’t mean he’s been a troublemaker or anything,” Mr. Secrist said. “Carl’s a good student.”
“He’s not in any trouble here, Mr. Secrist. Thank you for calling. We appreciate it.”
“Well, if you’d ever like to come in for a conference or anything, just let me know.”
“Sure. Thanks.” I hung up. I was nearly out of the room when the phone rang again. I walked back and answered it.
The voice was puzzled.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mr. Secrist said. “I was trying to dial another number and must have redialed yours by mistake.” He chuckled. “Busy day.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I know what you mean.” We hung up. I was almost to the kitchen when the phone rang again. I called ahead to Lanny, “I got it,” and answered the one on the kitchen wall.
The caller made a surprised sound. It was Mr. Secrist again. “Man, I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I made sure I dialed the right number this time. Something must be wrong with the phones.” He paused. “Well, this is embarrass
ing.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Maybe you should try another phone, or call the phone company.”
“I’ll call the phone company from another phone,” he said.
“That’s probably a good idea,” I said. “Thanks again for calling about Carl.”
We hung up. Lanny looked at me. She was slicing peeled potatoes into halves on the chopping block. It made a sound that filled the momentary silence between us. Schock. Schock.
“What about Carl?” she said. “Who was that?”
“A counselor from school. He said Carl fought with his teacher today and got sent to the principal.”
She looked at me and set the knife down on the block and wiped her hands on a towel.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “Kids know things. They can tell when something’s wrong.” She picked up the knife again. “It’s us he’s upset over.”
The phone rang again.
“Jesus, if that’s him again,” I said. We had a couple of old phones that came with the house. No caller ID, none of that stuff. “He’s called three times already.”
“Who?”
“The counselor. He said his phone’s messed up.”
I answered it on the third ring.
“Bob?” the caller said.
“You must have the wrong number,” I said, and hung up.
“What are we going to do about Carl?” Lanny said.
“We need to sit him down and tell him. Explain it to him.”
She was quiet. She chopped another potato. Schock. Then set the knife down again. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “We’ve just ignored Carl through all this. We never pay him any attention. And he’s going to be the one it’s hardest on.” She breathed hard and looked down at her hands. They were pink from working in the kitchen and I had a moment of guilt about sitting out on the porch while she started supper by herself. I put it out of my mind. Lanny took a deep breath and seemed on the verge of tears. The phone rang again. I snatched it up.