Crawlers

by John Shirley

  “What’s on-line got to do with it?”

  “Tell you later. I think the phone’s okay.” He turned away, then stopped, seemed to think a moment, then turned back to Donny. “I’ll tell you one thing though—Roy’s parents don’t give a shit he’s gone. I’m doing this myself. Dude was my best friend.” He added wistfully, “He asked me to come with him to the cops, and I didn’t go.”

  His voice had dropped to less than audible. Donny shook his head. “The cops? What about? What’s up with that?”

  “Just—call me. There’s some shit going down. I figure maybe you’d help me organize a meeting or something. You’re a guy who does shit like that. Like you got them to build that skate park for the woodpushers, and that protest about there being no black history day at the school. So . . .”

  “So what is it?”

  Lance shook his head decisively. “I don’t wanta talk about it here. Actually, give me a call and we’ll arrange to meet. I’m not even sure about the fucking telephone.”

  Donny looked at Lance, weighing him up. The guy tweaking on amphetamines?

  “Okay, whatever. I’ll call you. Later on.”

  Donny drove around behind the shopping center, where the loading docks were, hoping to catch a bum foraging out in the Dumpster, get another picture. From back here, the shopping center was fortresslike. A copse of small leafless sugar maple trees stood just beyond the edge of the tarmac, and up the hill.

  A movement caught his attention. Something shaped all wrong was swinging through the trees.

  He swung the car around so the headlights pointed in that general direction. Put it in park and got out to stand beside it. He wanted to get whatever it was on camera. He figured it was some kind of sloth, maybe, swinging through the trees like a monkey. He raised his camera—and froze.

  It was a dog—up in the trees. A midsize terrier was swinging through the trees like a monkey.

  It had some kind of metal tentacles instead of its front paws, metal spines waving around on its back, and faceted glass eyes.

  “Fuck!” Donny blurted, and convulsively snapped the picture. The thing reacted, and was gone in a flash of fur and slinking chrome into the bushes up the hill.

  He went a few steps up a thin trail, but water was trickling down the slope and he only slid back down in the slick mud and couldn’t see the thing any longer.

  He went back to the idling car, shaking, and sat down behind the wheel. Okay, he thought, that was like somebody’s escaped pet monkey, with maybe a chain leash on it, and I saw it all wrong.

  He looked at the snap on the screen in the back of the digital camera.

  It was all murky, half-hidden by branches. Could be a stuffed toy thrown into a tree. Wouldn’t convince anyone of anything.

  He shook his head. It hadn’t been what it had seemed.

  He decided he wanted to go home. See Moms and Pops. Thinking about them made him feel funny. They’d been really distant lately; gone from home a lot. Way more than ordinary.

  He drove around the shopping center to the parking lot. Maybe he could get Lance to come back and they’d find the thing and . . .

  Lance and his friends were gone. There was only a pop-eyed fat lady, wheezing as she carried a bag to her car.

  He drove into the street, thinking that he wasn’t going to tell his folks about what he had seen in the tree after all. Maybe he’d tell Adair or Siseela. But even they wouldn’t believe him. His parents would think he was on drugs. And he never took drugs. Mostly never.

  He found himself driving home fast, breaking the speed limit by enough that one of the neighbors, that old woman who always came outside in her bathrobe on Valleyview, shouted, “Slow down!” as he passed. He didn’t even slow for the speed bumps on Wright Street; the car bounced and clanked, maybe dented the muffler.

  He was relieved to find both parents’ cars parked in front of the big ivory-colored house, Moms’s gold Saturn and Pops’s silver Jaguar. His mom was half white, half Asian; his pops, a surgeon, was “blacker than some, black enough,” as he put it; a tall ex-college football star who’d made a lot of money specializing in sports medicine. He’d put the San Jose Sharks right, more than once.

  He parked, hurried into the house. “Yo, you guys!” he called. He just wanted to see them. He wasn’t even sure why. “Hey, yo, your beloved tax write-off is home!”

  There was no answer. Just the overloud pendulum tocking of that antique grandfather clock Moms had bought. The whole house was furnished in expensive antiques Donny was afraid to touch.

  He looked at his watch. Sometimes they went to bed by this time.

  He went up the stairs and listened in front of their bedroom door. He didn’t hear the bed squeaking, so it wasn’t that. He tapped on the door to their bedroom. “You asleep?”

  Still no answer. He felt as if he should assume they were asleep, and just go down and get on-line or watch TV or something.

  But he couldn’t assume that. He didn’t know why, but he had to see them in there, asleep, together. He had to know they were all right.

  Like my parents are my kids, he thought, chuckling nervously at himself.

  He opened the door softly, not wanting to wake them. There they were, lying side by side.

  They were lying on the bed, on their backs, fully dressed. They just lay there, silently.

  They had their eyes wide open.

  For a moment he had a frantic thought that they were dead, because they were so still and it was as if they weren’t even breathing.

  Then they both turned their heads, at exactly the same moment with exactly the same motion, and looked directly at him.

  “Hello, son,” Pops said.

  “Um.” His mouth was so dry it was hard to speak. He licked his lips. “You guys—okay?”

  “Certainly,” Moms said.

  “Certainly,” Pops said. “We’re just resting. Having a talk.”

  “Son,” Moms said, “there’s a blood test coming up at the school soon—”

  Then she broke off, and turned her head as if listening to some willfully intrusive thought. “No,” she murmured. “Not yet.”

  “Okay, whatever,” Donny said.

  He closed the door and went to his own room, thinking, It wasn’t like it seemed. What’s wrong with me?

  Endless delays, trying to leave the school. Bert and Lacey cornered by the chatterbox who organized class schedules, the security guard confused about his parking pass . . . But Lacey had already taken to calling him Bert.

  A light rain started up, as Bert finally drove Lacey out of the parking lot in his old Tercel. He hoped to God the little car didn’t break down on the road again. The ramshackle little vehicle embarrassed him even when it ran.

  Bert shook his head, wondering at himself again. He hadn’t really cared what anyone thought of his car until today. Had it been so long that a little attraction made him irrational? But it had been only six months since he’d last gone to bed with a woman, though that thing with Emily hadn’t lasted long. Nothing had lasted long since Juanita. He had convinced himself he was going to ease into a comfortable bachelorhood and accept a lonely death with existential fortitude.

  The rain was just enough to require wipers. When he switched them on they almost scratched the glass. He was way overdue to have them replaced.

  “Must be tiring, teaching a class so late in the evening,” she said.

  “I’m sort of used to it. Keeps me out of trouble.”

  “Me, too,” she said gravely. “I’d be gambling away my life savings if I weren’t in the class.” He looked at her curiously, and she laughed. She was kidding. “Everything’s a gamble—that’s what I got from that passage you read, from Whitman.”

  They spoke of Whitman and Auden—she had a liking for Auden, it seemed—until they got to Quiebra Valley Road. Here every sort of tree, each type in its clump, hunched thick green mysteries in close beside the narrow highway. Now and then on the shoulders of this dark, curving stretch
of wet asphalt were white wooden crosses with artificial flowers and deflated mylar balloons.

  She turned her head to look as they passed another cross. “Those are all from people who died here? Jeez, that’s three or four now on this one stretch of road.”

  “We had a big speeding problem on this road. It’s really twisty and narrow. They killed kids with their cars, and the families put up those crosses. We got a good commander over at the Quiebra PD, guy named Cruzon, he put up a whole series of checkpoints to catch the drunks. Got the DA to do some prosecution, too, improved the situation some. But those kids are still dead.”

  He glanced at her, wondering how she’d take that hint of his basic pessimism. He could see the good in things, but the dark side was always there, too. And he wouldn’t turn his back on it. Foolish to turn your back on it.

  But she was nodding. “Yeah. People lose their kids, there really isn’t any closure, any resolution to how they feel.”

  The wipers screeched and swished across the windshield; the rain beaded and blew in trails, up the hood of the car.

  They were quiet. He thought about how he had just met her. It wasn’t wise to ask a student for a date, even an adult like Lacey. But then—

  Something fell from an overhanging tree limb, clattered and sparked onto the hood, and scuttled up onto the windshield.

  It was a handful of somethings. Little pieces of irregularly shaped metal—or metal-threaded glass? Driven by the wind and the slap of the wipers, he supposed, they seemed to twist about to reorient themselves, fitting together, almost in the shape of a little animal, a lizard or—

  “Look out!” Lacey burst out.

  Then he saw it, too.

  Headlights were blazing toward them, a truck’s horn was blaring. Working hard to keep from jerking the steering wheel in a panicky way, he steered sharply onto the shoulder. The little car fishtailed, bouncing, heading toward the gorge. Then it stopped on the edge of a steep drop-off to Quiebra Creek, so abruptly that both of them whiplashed.

  The car shuddered, and the engine died.

  10

  December 3, night

  Vinnie Munson sat with Mother Munson; Vinnie on the small sofa; Mother, a scrawny, wispy-haired woman, twisted half-sideways in her heavily padded recliner, under a comforter. Just the two of them in the cluttered, close little living room of the bungalow. He was watching MTV with the sound turned off; she was giving him her usual running commentary.

  Sometimes Vinnie looked at the screen directly, but when he felt the pictures pushing on his eyes, he had to look away and follow it out of the corners of his eyes, with quick glances. Taking in the mostly naked girls dancing around behind the black rap stars with big gold chains swinging over their taut chest muscles; girls spilling out of limousines behind the man as he came out posing and rapping, tilting his head rhythmically this way and that so his dark glasses caught the light. Mother explained why it was bad, as he listened and watched.

  “You see that’s whore behavior right there, please,” Mother was saying. “That’s unsuitable. Showing your boomies because you want to be in that man’s video. For money. On the Dean Martin Show he had some dancers in short skirts, but it wasn’t whore dancing like this. That’s just unsuitable.”

  Mother’s eyes sparkled. They were having a great time. She’d have been disappointed if he’d turned off this disgraceful programming.

  The video ended, and they had one of those crazy MTV animations where the word MTV blew itself up and reassembled like a monster or something. Vinnie had to look away. He didn’t like that. It was too much like the brain cartoons that tormented him at night.

  “I won’t be in that rectangle when they’re washing my hair that way,” Vinnie said.

  “Well, I should think not,” Mother said. She always had something agreeable to say to him, though she understood him only about half the time. But half the time was ten times more than anyone else. She liked to criticize the things they saw together, but she meant it kindly. When on Sundays they went to the International House of Pancakes they all knew her there and they made sure to heat up her maple syrup and there was one girl who brought Vinnie extra pancakes, extra bacon. He couldn’t look directly at her, when she was there, but he saw her in window reflections, or out of the corner of his eye, and she was a thin little woman like his mother, only young. Mother talked about how Vinnie had charmed that girl, and he sometimes actually laughed his barking laugh at that. It took a lot to make him laugh.

  Next they were going to have The Real World on. Mother let him turn on the sound for that. She liked to comment on how badly behaved those kids were and feel sorry for the ones who sounded lost. There was one on lately named Lorena who would start crying about how the others put her down, and Mother would say, “Oh, the poor honey. You see what she’s gotten into? She’s a good girl and they act like that. Oh, that’s a shame, Vinnie. Do you want some cocoa?”

  She made him cocoa and popcorn, and they ate it together, watching young people whine on The Real World. He loved cocoa. He loved popcorn. He loved his mother. He wished he could let her give him a hug more often, like she wanted to, but it took a lot of inner preparation for that. Anyway, she knew he loved her. He always made her a valentine with his own hands, for February 14.

  So they just sat in the living room together and watched The Real World. As much as he could watch it directly. He didn’t have to think about the machine blue jays or the pill-bug squirrels. He didn’t have to think about the voices from his seizures. He could be with Mother, and they were happy just being together like this.

  It was bliss.

  “Oh, hell,” Bert muttered as the engine died. “I’m sorry, Lacey. Son of a bitch. I can’t believe it. Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” She rubbed at her neck. “It’s okay. Not even any real whiplash, I don’t think. You?”

  “I’m just mortified, is all. Something fell on the hood and I was staring at it and I must’ve crept over the center lane—just after my self-righteous speech about the drivers around here!”

  She chuckled, nodding. “The world likes to remind us.” “When we’re being pompous? Definitely. Holy cow, my heart’s pounding.”

  She looked at the hood of the car and along the edges of the windshield. “I don’t see anything now.”

  “Oh, but it was there. It must’ve been something like tinsel blown off one of those mylar balloons—from the crosses. I thought it was going to block my vision, and by God it did, just by being distracting.”

  “I know, I saw it, too! I mean, it’s not there now. Whatever it was. It didn’t look like tinsel. Little shiny things, like tiny puzzle pieces. My guess is it’s something from a power pole. An electrical conductor thingie that broke off or . . . something.”

  He tried to start the car, but it wouldn’t, and from the whining, clicking sound of it he’d jarred something loose in the already balky starter. “It’s probably nothing major but . . . Last time I tried to fix the car myself I broke it worse. Do you have a cell phone?”

  “I do. Right here in my purse.”

  But the phone didn’t work; it crackled and muttered and wouldn’t connect.

  “Wouldn’t you know it. The one time you really need one. Well. Shall we walk till we find one of those yellow call boxes?” He peered up the road. “Those emergency phone things.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” They got out into the rain—slackened, now, to a fine mist. Once more, Bert squinted down the road, looking for a call box. There wasn’t one.

  She whistled softly, and he went to stand beside her on the verge of the drop-off to the creek. “Look at that, Bert!”

  They stared off into the darkness, below the road—the darkness he’d almost plunged the car into. They’d hit the shoulder right where the screen of trees parted for an opening into the narrow gorge of Quiebra Creek, maybe a hundred feet below. “Jesus! It must be the deepest part of the canyon here! The damn car would’ve turned over two or three times on the way down
!”

  Then he looked at her, wondering if he’d scared her, saying that.

  But she was grinning. “I know! That’ll sure as hell wake you up, won’t it?”

  A lot of other women would have been angry, or at least anxious, at a close call like that. But she reveled in having survived, at the closeness of it.

  “It’s funny there isn’t a guard rail here,” she said, leaning to look into the gorge. “Oh! I see! There was—only it’s down there now!”

  Bert followed her gaze and could just pick out the twisted white metal ribbon of the guard rail, tangled with the hulk of an old SUV, crumpled into a cluster of boulders, forty or so feet below. “Oh, yeah. I remember that one. That SUV’s been down there for months. Leaking gas into the creek, no doubt. They really should’ve hauled it out by now. And fixed the guard rail. But for the grace of God, we could be down there with it.”

  Lacey turned back to the road, set her face toward Quiebra.

  “Shall we?” she said matter-of-factly.

  They buttoned up and started off toward town. The rain stopped altogether, and clouds broke open around the moon. The trees dripped. The moonlight was strong when the clouds allowed it; sometimes it was muted as the clouds slid past and the darkness would mass around Bert and Lacey.

  He glanced back at his car and sighed. “I’m sorry. That truck. I shouldn’t have let anything distract me.”

  She looked at him; her smile caught the moonlight through the trees. “Not at all. It’s not so cold now. Not an unpleasant night for a walk. I was startled by that stuff on the windshield, too. I’d have done the same thing.”

  Bert growled to himself. “That . . . blankety-blank trucker.”

  “You can say it! Tell it like it is! Witness!”

  “That fucking trucker should have stopped to make sure we were all right.” After a moment he grunted to himself, conceding, “Could be, the dumb son of a gun didn’t even see us go off the road. It happened around the curve from where he went.”

  The night released the sound of their footsteps and not much more. He started to relax a little, look around, enjoy the walk a little; the trees dripping, the mulch exhaling a delicious, deep odor of leafy decay—odd how some kinds of decay could be pleasant. Maybe because it hinted about life closing the circle, about energy being released from what had been inert.