Keepers

by Gary A Braunbeck

  I pulled the folding step stool out from the pantry and set it firmly in place, then climbed up and opened one of the highest cabinet doors, fishing around toward the back until I found the old and (for many years now) unused bottle of Johnny Walker Black. This was a masochistic little ritual I performed on those rare occasions when my nerves got the better of me despite my insisting otherwise: take out the temptation and stare it in the face and see if you’re still made of something.

  I am not one who believes that the best way to overcome temptation is to expunge its source from your universe, no; to me, temptation can only be overcome when it becomes boring, trivial, commonplace, and the best way to make it mundane is to always have it near and remind yourself that it’s near. Makes it easier to hold it in your grip and not caress it as you would the hand of a lover, take a good look at it and give it a good look at you, then smile to yourself because you’ve won and cache it away again until the next time your nerves don’t get the better of you.

  Don’t let anyone tell you that recovering alcoholics live well and happily never wanting a taste again; you never don’t want a drink, and eventually that becomes easier to deal with—it’s when you begin to think that the drink wants you that it’s time to dust off that sponsor’s number and put your pride in check.

  I looked at Johnny W., he looked at me, and pretty soon (despite the old man’s blood soaking deeper into my core) we decided we’d had enough of each other’s delightful company. He went his way, I went mine, and the folding step stool slipped back into its place wondering why in the hell I’d bothered it in the first place.

  I opted for a cup of hot chocolate. Powdered instant. Domestically, I have grown slightly complacent in my middle age. And why not? We’re born into a nearly ruined world, so the best we can do is make ourselves as comfortable as possible whenever we have the chance; the easier it is to do so, the better. Sometimes. Not always. Just sometimes.

  I wandered into the living room, sipping happily away at my yummy Swiss Miss, and began to reach for the phone to call the group home once more.

  Glancing out the front window, I saw the two black mastiffs sitting across the street, staring at my house.

  The Keepers are coming …

  The phone rang just as my hand touched the receiver, startling the living shit out of me.

  I dropped the hot chocolate, spilling some of it on my pants, cursed, then answered, listening as the anxious voice of the supervisor on the other end informed me that Carson was missing. I told them I was on my way and hung up.

  I looked back outside again.

  The dogs were gone.

  (Maybe they weren’t there in the first place, pal. Maybe they’re just flashes of memory. You remember those flashes, don’t you? The ones you’re always ignoring. The ones that the meds are supposed to help you understand and deal with. The ones you’ve spent half your goddamn life trying to convince yourself don’t exist, that it didn’t happen, that you—)

  “Get away from me!” I shouted, kicking the mug across the room where it shattered against the wall.

  I took several deep breaths, standing there with my eyes closed until I was certain I had control of things.

  There.

  All good now.

  All better.

  I was fine. I was fine. I was fine.

  There were no other dogs.

  No other memories.

  Nothing that would come sneaking out of the dark and take me by surprise.

  I grabbed my coat and headed out the door.

  SEVEN

  I became Carson’s legal guardian after his mother died from a heart condition that no one—including her, as it turned out—knew she had. (“All these years, I thought it was just gas.”) My sister was a woman of singular grace who never let anything phase her; hangnails were met with the same dogged composure as broken bones. In all the toofew years she’d been in my life, I don’t think I ever once saw her panic. Even when she awoke after an emergency C-section to discover that her child had Down’s syndrome and that her peach of a husband had left her because he couldn’t handle it, she never allowed any setback or misfortune to best her. I loved her dearly and miss her every day.

  Carson spent three weeks every month at the group home; the fourth week—and all holidays—he spent with me. He wanted it that way, and so did I. After seven days, we started getting on each other’s nerves a bit, so one week a month was just the ticket for us. And I could visit or call him whenever I wanted … which I usually did somewhere around the middle of Week Three.

  He was never lonely. That was important to me.

  One of the things my nephew and I discovered we had in common was a love of comic books. Admittedly, I hadn’t really been involved in the comics scene since the heyday of Ghost Rider, Aquaman, and The Silver Surfer (though I have to admit to a shortlived renaissance during the early appearances of Sandman), but Carson didn’t care. Spider-Man united us. We were of one mind when it came to the Green Goblin (he was an annoying wuss), Doc Ock (dangerous, scary, and kind of cool), and Kingpin (very fat and rude but never turn your back on him, uh-uh). Carson always helped out at the Cedar Hill store on those weeks he stayed with me; he was my unofficial Comics Manager.

  One of our rituals whenever he stayed with me involved his hauling out his latest batch of comic book acquisitions and reading them to me. Another ritual involved our driving out toward Buckeye Lake for dinner at the I-70 truck stop, Carson’s favorite place to eat. (The food is surprisingly excellent.)

  As I drove toward the group home, I began thinking how, a few months ago, these rituals had converged.

  Carson had adopted a cat that he kept at my house. I had no arguments about his keeping it at the house, as long as he paid for the food and litter from the money he earned working at the AARC sheltered workshop. Besides, the cat proved to be agreeable company at night, was always very affectionate, and didn’t shed nearly as much as I’d feared at first.

  The cat—which Carson named Butterball—ran away one night as I was taking out the trash and failed to close the back door behind me. I dreaded telling Carson about it as I drove to the group home to pick him up for our week together. I had the radio tuned to Cedar Hill’s National Public Radio station where two agricultural scientists were discussing the remote possibility that an outbreak of scrapie was starting to infect sheep in Montana.

  By the time Carson and I got back to my house (after cheeseburgers at the Sparta and a matinee at the newly renovated Midland Theater, the pride of downtown Cedar Hill) I knew there was no avoiding it.

  I pulled up in front, killed then engine, then turned to him and said, “Carson, I need to tell you something. I’m afraid it might be bad news.”

  “I know,” he said, softly bouncing up and down in the seat.

  I grinned for only a moment. “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “Uh-huh. Butterball ran away and—hey, you know what? I got some new slippers. They’re real warm and—”

  “Whoa, Carson, hang on. How … how did you know about Butterball?”

  “‘Cause Long-Lost told me.”

  “And who’s Long-Lost?”

  He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a comic book, then rifled through the pages until he came to a dog-eared page. “This is him.” He handed over the comic.

  The whole thing—front and back covers included—was drawn in black and white. The paper stock was cheap (some of the ink rubbed off on my fingertips) and it was hand-bound with plastic spirals. A homemade comic if ever there was one.

  It was open to a full-page drawing of a creature that was so incredible I was momentarily taken back in time to my first encounter with Bruce Banner’s alter ego, The Incredible Hulk. “Wow. That’s pretty cool.”

  And it was. This creature named Long-Lost stood in the middle of a futuristic-looking city where it towered over every building around it. It had the head of rat with a unicorn’s spiraling horn rising from the center of its forehead; the snout of a p
ig, the body and wings of a bat; the legs of a spider; a horse’s tail; and two semi-human arms jutting from its chest, one hand gripping a pencil, the other a sketch pad. The more I looked at it, the more details registered; its body was composed of fish scales, its wings were a mosaic of hundreds of different varieties of feathers, its underbelly looked slick as a dolphin’s skin, and its spider’s legs ended in paws that were a combination of dog and cat.

  It was both grotesque and remarkable, the work of an underground artist who was obviously gifted in a way only the truly and happily demented can be; despite all of its disparate parts, Long-Lost as a whole seemed at once organic and correct, as if it should look no other way than this.

  “So this is who told you about Butterball?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s the Monarch of Modoc.”

  “What’s Modoc?”

  Carson shook his head and made a tsk-ing noise. “Boy, you sure are goofy sometimes.” He took the comic from my hand and closed it, turning the cover toward me.

  And there it was: Modoc: Land of the Abandoned Beast.

  “Modoc is Long-Lost’s kingdom?” I asked.

  “It ain’t a kingdom like with knights and stuff, y’know? It’s like in the future, only it’s not, really. It’s like a … a hidden world. There’s people and everything and they all love Long-Lost and he protects them.”

  I nodded my head and asked him if I could see the comic again. He reluctantly handed it over. I flipped through the pages, stopping here and there to read the dialogue in the various balloons … except there wasn’t any. In each frame where a character was speaking, its speech-bubble was blank. It was only through the badly printed narration in the squares that I was able to discover that Long-Lost was preparing Modoc for something Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know. (That’s how the phrase was written every time it appeared: Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know.) I handed it back to Carson.

  “How could Long-Lost tell you about Butterball when there are no words?”

  “There’s words there. I can see ’em but you can’t, yet.”

  “Yet?”

  Carson nodded. “It’s a secret.”

  “Okay.” But it still didn’t explain how he’d known about the cat. Or how he’d come up with the phrase hidden world. I wondered if he even knew what that meant.

  “Carson?”

  “We gonna go to the Sparta again tomorrow? They make good cheeseburgers.”

  “The best known to mankind, yes—but I was about to ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is this a joke you’re playing on me? Did you sneak out last night and get Butterball and take him back to the group home?”

  “Nuh-uh. Butterball went to live at the Magic Zoo.”

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

  “Yeah … but not about this. I lie about Christmas presents—like telling you I don’t got one for you. I lie like that. But not this. This Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know.”

  I decided to let it rest for a while. If this was a joke of some kind, Carson would tell me eventually; if it wasn’t, at least he wasn’t upset. I only hoped that Butterball was all right. I really liked having that cat around.

  Later, after dinner, Carson pulled out a whole stack of Modoc comics and sat next to me on the couch, showing me each page of every issue, in order, so I could follow what was going on.

  Long-Lost ruled Modoc, a place where human beings and animals lived together in perfect accord. Long-Lost kept everyone in Modoc happy and entertained by drawing their wishes and then making those wishes come to life. It was a good-enough place. But there was an evil hexer, Tumeni Notes, who was trying to cast a spell so that the animals would revolt against Long-Lost and force him to show Tumeni where the Great Scrim was located. The Great Scrim separated Modoc’s world from our own… . On and on it went, becoming dumbfoundingly complicated as it threw in everything from simultaneous-universe theories to Darwinism and a dash or two of modern DNA research. I found it difficult to believe that Carson—though categorized as a “high-functional” Down’s and capable of reading at a fifth-grade level—could understand all of this, let alone keep it straight.

  He came to the most recent issue and opened it to the first page, then let out a little gasp and immediately closed it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Can’t read this one yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “‘Cause I’m not supposed to.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Tsk-ing again. “You’re goofy. I can’t read it ’cause Long-Lost won’t let me see the words yet.”

  “But there aren’t any words in the first place.”

  “Are too.”

  I grabbed up three issues at random and opened them to various pages. “Look at this—Carson, come on! Look! Nowhere, see? Nowhere in any of these comics does any of the characters say anything. See? Just empty space.” I was shocked at how angry I suddenly felt.

  “I told you already, there’re words in them, you just can’t see ’em.”

  “Yet,” I added, all at once too frustrated to care.

  “Uh-huh. Long-Lost does it to me, too. When I get a new Modoc, the words aren’t always there ’cause he don’t feel like talking to me yet. I gotta wait.”

  “Like I have to wait?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why do I have to wait? Why can’t Long-Lost just let me read the same words he says to you?”

  “‘Cause he won’t say the same thing to you. He told me that, just like he told me about Butterball. He says different things to different people … but only if he likes them.”

  Time for aspirin and sleep.

  The next morning Carson woke me at seven-thirty and told me that we had to go to the truck stop for breakfast.

  “Carson, my head hurts and I’ve had about four hours’ sleep. Can’t it wait?”

  “No!” He sounded both excited and slightly scared. “We gotta go now.”

  “Why?”

  He showed me the latest issue of Modoc—the one he couldn’t read to me the night before—and opened it to the first page.

  I was looking at a black-and-white drawing of the I-70 truck stop near Buckeye Lake. There was a car driving into its parking lot. My car. With Carson and me inside. And something that looked like the ghost of a bear floating behind us.

  I took the comic from my nephew’s hands and turned to the next page. It was blank.

  Okay; if Carson wanted to continue stringing me along with his little joke, I’d go with it for a while. It was kind of nice to see him putting this much effort into pulling the wool over my eyes.

  All the way to the truck stop, I found myself glancing in the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see some diaphanous form pursuing us; Ursa Major, P.I.

  We took our usual booth and ordered. While we waited for the food to arrive, Carson opened the Modoc issue and turned to the second page and showed me the “new” panels. They displayed, in order, our arriving at the truck stop, eating, paying our bill, and driving away. There were six panels per page, and in each frame we were joined in ever-developing degrees by ghostly creatures of myth; the centaur, the manticora, the chimera, and a griffin.

  What started making me nervous was how the illustrations showed both of us eating precisely what we had ordered: pancakes, sausage, and a large chocolate milk for Carson; a western omelet and coffee for myself.

  I knew from his monthly status reports that many of the specialists at the group home believed Carson possessed a gift for artwork. I wondered how he’d managed to draw these panels without my seeing him do it.

  Carson was twenty-six, having outlived doctors’ estimates for his life by more than a decade. He was getting sneaky in his old age. Or I was becoming obtuse in mine.

  For the first time in ages, the two of us ate in silence. We then paid our bill and left.

  As we were driving out of the parking lot and getting back onto the road, Carson turned to t
he next page. So far, only one frame was there. In it, our car was making a right onto Arboretum Road—a good twelve miles away.

  “Well, at least Long-Lost is giving us a little time,” I said.

  Carson turned on the radio. It was still tuned to the local NPR station. This time the subject was “Foot-and-Mouth Disease: Is It Coming Back Again?”

  I slowed the car as we neared the turnoff to Arboretum Road.

  “We could just keep driving,” I said. “Nothing’s forcing us to do what’s drawn there.”

  “Long-Lost says we gotta. He says it’ll cause all kinds of trouble if we don’t.”

  “Tell Long-Lost for me that he and I need to have a talk.”

  “He knows. He’s planning on having a special talk with you. About me. An’ stuff.”

  And with that, I turned onto Arboretum Road.

  This time we didn’t consult the comic book. About half a mile down the road there was a large fallen tree blocking the way. We would have to turn around and go back the way we came, and the only way to do that was to turn onto another, much narrower, unpaved side road—which was really more of a glorified footpath—then back out slowly as I worked the wheel.

  As soon as we turned onto the path I looked up and realized where we were.

  “Audubon’s Graveyard,” I whispered to myself.

  “What?” said Carson.

  “Nothing.” Which, of course, wasn’t the truth. Having lived in Cedar Hill all of my life, I’d heard of Audubon’s Graveyard—it was something of a local legend—but had never actually seen it, knew only that it was located somewhere in the vicinity of Arboretum Road.

  I killed the engine and stared out at the small rise a few dozen yards ahead. A couple of pigeons lay there, dead, stiff, wings splayed, eyes glassy and staring up toward the sky they would never know again.

  Carson reached over and gently touched my shoulder. “Where are we?”

  “It’s, um … well …” How could I explain this place to him?

  There was a five-acre plat on the other side of that rise which some smartass reporter had long ago dubbed “Audubon’s Graveyard,” actually thinking the name displayed wit and irony. There were still some locals who referred to this area simply as “The Nest,” but it was “Audubon’s Graveyard” that stuck.