Crawlers

by John Shirley

  Nothing.

  She simply stood there, breathing loudly, with her mouth hanging open. Making—he could barely hear it—that faint strangled sound.

  Something was seriously wrong with his mom. “Okay, that’s it, Mom! I’m getting Dad!”

  “No!”

  Cal hurried over to her, reached for her.

  She took a step back from him. As if afraid. She made that strangled sound again.

  He hesitated. “Something—caught in your throat?”

  “Yes. No. Sort of. Maybe. Cal, it took me all this time. It can be fought. It can be—”

  Then Dad was there, in the kitchen doorway. He was staring at Mom. His lips were moving.

  And Mom suddenly seemed fine. She smiled and said, “Jeez, something caught in my throat, there.”

  It seemed to Cal—he wasn’t sure, because he saw it from the corner of his eye—that Dad had mouthed those words silently as Mom had said them. Something caught in my throat.

  No. Not possible.

  Mom was smiling at him. “Go on, go on your walk, Cal. Certainly. Go right on ahead. We’ll see you later, son.”

  Cal looked from one parent to the other, then shook his head in wonder. It was rare for either one of them to call him “son.” Not that they acted like he wasn’t their son. They just didn’t call him that. Calling him that sounded like something from one of those old shows on TV Land.

  A feeling rose inarguably up in him that he had to get somewhere far away, as fast as he could—and he didn’t know why.

  “Actually, Mom? Can I borrow the truck for a couple of hours?”

  “Certainly.” She turned very suddenly and went toward Dad. The two of them went into the garage.

  Certainly? Normally she’d have given up the keys only after an argument, especially with Dad watching.

  Whatever. This was his chance to get the truck.

  He got the keys from the hook on the wall, went out to the curb, and got in the car. He started it—and just sat there.

  He tried to think of somewhere to go.

  Mason hesitated in the doorway of the kitchen, watching Uncle Ike cleaning his rifle in the living room. He didn’t like to be around Uncle Ike when he was cleaning his gun. Ike was a big guy in a hot-pink bowling shirt and shorts and flip-flops; he had receding red-blond hair and freckles and enormous hands. He’d sit there at the coffee table drinking Bud and cleaning that 30.06, and it just made Mason paranoid because he knew that Uncle Ike had flipped out on Aunt Bonnie, at least once, which is why Aunt Bonnie had gone to her cousin Teresa’s place to live. At least, she said, till Ike went back on antidepressants—or amphetamines.

  When he wasn’t on amphetamines he would alternate between glum disinterest, vague friendliness, and manic rages. And here he was cleaning that gun. In movies the hit man cleaned the gun right before he shot someone.

  “When you gonna clean this house, you little prick?” Uncle Ike said, ramming a long skinny brush through the bore of the rifle.

  Mason looked around. Dirty clothes lay about the floor, which was otherwise papered over with cast-aside old issues of the National Enquirer. The beer cans and pizza boxes had been shoved off the coffee table onto the floor to make room for Uncle Ike’s cleaning kit and the rifle.

  The kitchen was worse. The place smelled rank, too, but you mostly smelled that only when you came in. Once you were inside a while you didn’t notice it anymore, unless you got near that big pile of garbage teetering over the trash can.

  “We need to get some chicks in here,” Mason said. “Clean this shit up, Uncle Ike.”

  “You’re the chick around here,” Uncle Ike said. “You get to earn your way by cleaning the house. You don’t work, you don’t bring any money in. You sell pot to eat on, but you don’t give me any of the money.”

  “You said you didn’t want any narco-money.”

  “That’s not what I’m fucking talking about. I’m talking about I get my ass to the bowling alley five nights a week to hand out those stinking bowling shoes and hear people whine about the lanes not working, and you’re here watching fucking Friends and Seinfeld reruns on TV.”

  “Hey, whoa. I got laid off, okay. I’m gonna get on over at the Square Deal garage.”

  “Even those fucking crooks wouldn’t hire you. Now fucking clean the house, you little prick.”

  Mason said, “Fuck you, man. I’ll sleep in my van.”

  He went out the door, fast but not neglecting to slam it. His plan was to smoke a few bowls, then go to a pay phone—his cell phone had been shut off—call up his young cousin Cal and see if he could get something to eat at his house. Cal and Adair were barely related to him, only by some kind of twice-removed in-law thing he couldn’t remember, but they treated him like a fucking human being, unlike Uncle Ike. That asshole.

  He went to the van, hearing Uncle Ike shouting behind him, through the door, something about don’t bother to come back—and stopped by the driver’s side door. A brown and white Ford Expedition was weaving along the street.

  “Whoa,” Mason said, fascinated. “He’s got to be all fucked up on something.”

  But then he saw that the driver was weaving with a purpose. He was chasing something down the street. A cat, a fat fluffy-white cat too panicked to get out of the road. But there—the cat spotted a wooden gate, darted right up and over to safety. The Expedition slowed down; the driver was a young guy with a scruffy haircut, a dirty uniform of some kind. He glared after the cat. Then he seemed to sense Mason, turned to look at him—and smiled, his whole face transforming.

  He rolled down his window and leaned out of the SUV. “Howdy, pardner,” the guy said.

  Mason recognized him, then. He was one of those two young marine guards they’d run into down at that site where some kind of military shit had fallen from a plane or something into the water.

  “That cat do something to you, dude? Don’t be, like, running cats over. That’s our neighbor’s cat.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t really going to hit it. I was just chasing it a little ways.”

  “Oh.” Mason was losing interest, but he couldn’t quite look away from the guy’s unblinking regard. “So, uh, hey, where’s your friend?” Mason added, for something to say. “The guy who was with you down there at the bay. The other jar—marine guy.”

  “Ah, yes, you were there. I retrieve you now,” the marine said, his smile broadening. “My friend? I’d like to know myself. He didn’t adjust well. He just fell apart. Some do well and some don’t. You know, I think you’d do rather well. You’d just fall right into place.”

  “Say what?” This motherfucker, Mason thought, is crazy. He must be, like, AWOL and shit, too. Bad news.

  Mason dug around his pocket for his van’s keys, then he saw he’d left them in the van. And the van door was locked. “Shit! I fucking locked my keys in the van!”

  He heard a car door open, looked over to see the marine walking toward him. His uniform was missing some buttons, and there were oil stains on the shirt. The guy had left his car running and left it in gear, and it was slowly, very slowly, starting to roll by itself down the street, angling randomly toward the curve.

  “Cuz, marine guy, you left your car in gear.”

  The marine nodded, smiling, completely unconcerned, and stepped between Mason and the van. He put his hand flat over the lock on the door of Mason’s van, and there was a clicking, a sound of tumblers, and the little black plastic cylinder of the door’s lock switch popped up, all by itself. “There you go,” the marine said.

  “Whoa,” Mason said. “How’d you do that?”

  “So yo,” the marine said, “you wanta smoke a bowl or something?”

  Mason only had a pinch or two left. “You got any? I’m about flat.”

  “Sure, I got some. Gung ho, man. Let’s get in the back of your van.”

  Mason was on automatic, in a way, after that, not questioning anything, and they were in the back of the van in about twenty seconds, the SUV forgotten
. Mason dug his little brass pipe out from under the driver’s seat, turning to see the marine crouched, not offering pot, not reaching for the pipe, just crouched—and opening his mouth really, really wide.

  It was impossible to open it that wide.

  Mason made a squeaking whimper that sounded funny in his own ears, and recoiled, turned to climb over the driver’s seat, to escape out the front.

  He got partway, then something grabbed his ankles and pulled him irresistibly into the back of the van.

  9

  December 3, evening

  Carrying coffee in a Styrofoam cup from the Cruller, Bert surveyed Winsecker’s night students as he entered his classroom, and found it about as he’d expected. Three or four elderly ladies looking for the “personal growth” they’d heard about on Oprah; four or five aspiring writers of both genders and varying age; a couple of gay middle-aged poetry enthusiasts who could probably quote Whitman—at least they wouldn’t be completely clueless; and a smattering of high school kids probably looking for extra credit to make up for something they’d failed.

  He did notice one bright-eyed lady, about his own age, with chestnut hair, a notebook open on her desk. Roll call established that her first name was Lacey, and she was new to the class.

  Bert wrote his name on the blackboard. Mr. B. Clayborn. Some teachers went with the just-call-me-Sam thing, but Bert, though only forty-one, was to some extent old-fashioned.

  “Welcome back to Adventures in American Literature. As you no doubt have heard, I’m taking over for Mr. Winsecker for the rest of the year. I do things my own way and will be assigning exactly what I please. The class title has the word adventure in it, but we won’t be reading the abominable Mr. James Fenimore Cooper or the overdiscussed Mark Twain—delightful as Mr. Clemens may be. Instead we’ll be focusing on the transcendentalists in the first half—”

  A middle-aged man raised his hand. A rumpled, heavyset man with a smug expression and a book on the Civil War sitting beside his notebook. “Will we be discussing Civil War literature?”

  “Well, Mr. . . .”

  “Gunderston. Ralph. You had my son in your—”

  “I remember! A senior last year, I think, in my high school class. I see the resemblance!”

  This brought a titter of laughter to the class, and a puzzled, irritated look to Ralph Gunderston.

  “Mr. Gunderston—Ralph, if I may—the short answer is: barely. That’s how much we’ll be discussing Civil War literature. We’re going to try to understand what American writers thought about life. Today let’s consider Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson as radical thinkers—as radical as Karl Marx.”

  Lacey’s eyes were calmly attentive the whole time, and she asked a couple of intelligent questions. He kept finding excuses to look at her.

  After class, as the students filed out and Bert packed up his briefcase, Lacey approached him—a little shy, yet unafraid—asking if he could recommend a biography of Thoreau. Something about being a journalist, some piece she was writing.

  On impulse, he offered to loan out a book. She accepted the biography he carried with him. He felt a sort of astonishment as he handed it to her. He never ever loaned books.

  She was saying something about being new to the area. Living over in Quiebra.

  “I live in Quiebra, too,” he said. “And thank God it’s unfashionable, because that makes it the only place in the Bay Area a teacher can afford to buy a house. Anyway, the only place that’s not an urban combat zone.”

  The last person he’d loaned a book to was the last woman he’d been serious about. Juanita Collins. She hadn’t returned any of his books, and eventually she’d stopped returning his phone calls. Then he’d heard she’d married some high-powered attorney. And that had hurt. He could imagine her comparing life with a community college teacher with life as a wealthy lawyer’s wife.

  Lacey nodded, watching him curiously. “Well, I’ve got to catch a bus. I haven’t gotten around to buying a car yet up here. I sold my little old L.A. freeway-flea.”

  “A journalist, you said? What sort of topics?”

  “Reporter, columnist. Irresponsible high-handed political opinionating, that kind of thing.”

  “Really. I’d love to read some irresponsible opinionating.” He astonished himself again with what was an almost out-of-control boldness on his part: “Did you say you’re catching a bus? It’s kind of cold out. I can give you a ride back to Quiebra. I mean, normally I couldn’t—if you were a young—I mean, it would look wrong my offering a ride to one of the—the freshmen girls, but I mean, not that you’re old—” He could feel his face burning. He shook his head. “Oh, Christ.”

  But she was laughing softly. “I’d appreciate a ride. It’s cold up here in the Bay Area. I’m used to Los Angeles.”

  Listening to Armand Van Helden on the CD player—world hip-hop rave-rap by a DJ with a German name—Donny stopped his ’91 Thunderbird at the stoplight between the shopping center and the strip mall and glanced at his watch. Sort of late.

  But he didn’t feel like going home yet. What was the use of Pops giving him his own car if he couldn’t drive around in it after school? He’d caught up on his homework using the computer in the school library; there’d been plenty of time because two of his teachers hadn’t shown up, and he’d heard the PE teachers weren’t around either, like there was a major teacher-hungry virus going around. He had the beeper they’d given him and they hadn’t beeped him, so it must be cool. All the same, he thought he ought to call Moms, at least. There were upsides and downsides to being an only child.

  When he’d dropped Cleo off, pretending he was going right home, she made fun of him for being Mr. Responsible all the time, and all he’d said was, “Ask Chris Rock.” She hadn’t known what he’d meant. And he was beginning to suspect he might have to deal with being in two minority groups.

  Maybe Cleo was suspecting it, too, the way she looked at him when he had said he wasn’t ready for sex.

  It wasn’t like she was really all sexed up and hot for him. She just didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. Donny thought he ought to play along, but he found the thought vaguely repulsive.

  He sighed. Really, he’d always known. Ever since seeing that movie where Wesley Snipes was mostly naked. Siseela was going to be disappointed, too.

  He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Are you or aren’t you? He shook his short dreads, just to watch them bounce a little. Then looked around, hoping no one had seen that. The only possible witness was that big greasy-haired guy in the Starbots jacket—Vinnie something—wandering down the sidewalk, turning his head sharply away when cars drove past. Talking to himself a mile a minute, as usual. That made Donny decide to do some digital-camera shots for his Web site before going home.

  He got the camera out of his backpack, and when the light changed he turned left and pulled up in the driveway of the shopping center, blocking Vinnie’s way long enough to catch his worried, oblique look in the digital camera—his anxious, sagging face turned away under the streetlight.

  Two shots. Then Donny waved at Vinnie, because he felt a little bad about scaring him, and drove into the parking lot. He always captioned the pictures on his Web site; that was part of the art. He decided he’d title the picture Vinnie Hides Right out in the Open.

  There: Four white dudes, nineteen or early twenties, were gathered around the front of a Trans Am with its hood up, under the bright parking lot light. Probably on their way somewhere and the car had started fucking up. They all four had sagging pants and baseball caps turned backwards, and they were all leaning to look into the engine: a great shot. He pulled up next to them, opened the window, took the picture. Click: the four of them in almost identical clothes peering fixedly into the engine. He’d caption it Destiny Omen.

  Then one of them looked up, glaring, and snarled, “What the fuck you think you doing, nigger?” and gave him the finger, and Donny snapped the finger and the angry white boy, too. He’d caption that What th
e Fuck You Think You Doing, Nigger? even though the guy followed up by grinning at him and making a dismissive gesture that meant he was just kidding. Then Donny recognized him: Lance something-or-other, he’d graduated last year. Held back a year, so he was almost twenty when he graduated. He was a gangly dude with an overbite and a shaved head under his backwards Oakland A’s cap.

  Donny drove around behind the Trans Am and then up parallel to it, and did a gruff-cop imitation. “What seems to be the trouble here, you boys? Give me a urine test, right now, goddamn it.”

  Lance laughed and came over to the car. “I’ll give you a urine test on your whitewalls, dude.” He thumped fists gently with Donny. “Hey, Donny, what’s up. You got that T-bird shinied up. Doing some snapshots and shit? You gonna put me on that Web site?”

  “Might. That ‘What you think you doing, nigger’ shit deserves to go up so everyone can see what a high-class fucker you are, Lance.”

  Lance laughed. “I know. I’m . . .” Then a kind of enigmatic sadness came over his face. He looked past Donny at a family coming out of the Albertsons; then he took a spindle of papers from his back pocket and handed Donny one. A leaflet.

  HAVE YOU SEEN ROY?

  Roy Beltraut has at this time been missing for more than 24 hours. If you have any information about his whereabouts it will be treated confidenchially. Please call.

  And there was a phone number.

  Under the text was a blurry black-and-white picture of Roy in a basketball uniform. Donny had played some pickup basketball with him a couple of times. A pretty decent guy, red-haired and shy, and really tall. He decided not to point out that confidentially wasn’t spelled with a ch.

  “Man, I played ball with this guy,” Donny said. “He run away?”

  Lance looked glumly at the picture of Roy in Donny’s hand. “I don’t think he ran away. Call me later, that’s my number there, I’ll tell you the whole story. I don’t want to say it around these fucking guys.” His voice dropped low. “Some of them talk on-line a lot. They might mention my name.”