American Monster

by J. S. Breukelaar

  She enlisted Gene’s help in searching for Earl’s missing diamonds; she’d looked all over for them. In the shed, in the barn (which contained nothing except for cousin Ty’s old Grizzly and Earl’s restored Ram Charger) and in the blackberry patch between the woods and the cornfield, but she hadn’t been able to find them. Auntie’s story was that Earl had let her choose two—she’d used one to pay for the funeral, she said, had the other made into a ring—from a handful he’d held out for her once, said he picked them up on his travels, or won them, blackjack mainly, a little poker or pool. The rest of them were out there somewhere and she’d find them or die trying.

  – Go a ways toward fixing up the place, she said, but what Auntie had in mind, Gene knew, was a different kind of fix, one that involved a small glass pipe and a cheap Bic lighter for her boyfriend Major Buzz, who’d fought in the New Korean Wars and was a little young for her, Gene thought, but who was he to say?

  He cleaned out the basement looking for the stones, searched the fireplace flues (all the chimneys had come down in the 2030 shake) and the gutters, not that he really believed the diamonds were there, but because it made things better between them, him and Auntie. Because after all this was the family home and would be his and Jesse’s one day, provided Major Buzz didn’t get his hands on it. Well, wasn’t that why he was here, to keep an eye on the family home, for Jesse and his girlfriend and their unborn child? Not to mention the operation on Jesse’s leg that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t afford. Gene didn’t really believe that but it gave him something to tell Gloria, and something to tell himself on the long walks they took in the charred hills and dried river beds. And when he wasn’t doing that or looking for diamonds, he did what chores he could around the place, or worked on the game he was designing, or found his own kind of fix down at The Trap, a windowless bar next to the Greyhound Station.

  Gene had never been very good on the land. That had been Jesse’s area until he lost the use of his left leg. But Gene managed to build a big enclosure for Gloria on the eastern side of the farm near the skeleton of an old pine by the cornfield where he and Jesse and cousin Ty used to fool around on the ATV. It was as far from Auntie and the house and the vegetable garden as possible but the wolf-dog still got out sometimes to demolish a couple rows of beans, once to piss a river on the squash and Gene expected the worst that time, but Auntie just stood there behind the kitchen window, drool hanging from her lips, her fingers clawing the beer can and something slithering in her black eyes that Gene could not read. Another time, Gene came home late one night to find Auntie trapped inside the house and Gloria on the back porch, her forelegs on the window sill and the two of them staring at each other, Gloria’s wolf-eyes pinning Auntie’s face to the dark glass. And in her eyes he could see it, something that moved there and had seen clear across to the other side. Bad mojo saying come out to play. With an effort that seemed to leave her depleted for days, Auntie shrugged it off. Blinked and wiped the drool off her chin. And the yellow fear went out of her eyes, in its place just the old, hard black hate.

  – That wild animal stink is everywhere, she said. I walk into the store, folks walk out.

  Well, folks had always walked out on Auntie, but he didn’t like to say. Jesse and him and even her own son Ty. Heading off to die in the desert as soon as he could, and Uncle Earl making himself pretty scarce when he retired, gone for days at a time, Auntie knew not where.

  On Route 119 one late November afternoon, Gene had to pull over in the sputtering Chevy to let Major Buzz and Auntie pass, doing ninety in the station wagon going toward the lake. He’d been at an interview at Lina’s Wieners and when he finally made it home in the sputtering truck, he saw that Gloria’s enclosure was open and the wolf was gone. He combed the ground until he came to a flattened patch of grass, a spray of blood on the bark of the pine that they’d missed in their efforts to leave no trace. He touched it and looked at the wet red blood on his fingers. When he checked under Auntie’s bed he saw that the 20-gauge had gone too and he knew he had no chance of stopping what had already taken place, not in the Chevy anyway. So he ran to the barn, hot-wired Uncle Earl’s big Dodge (something Ty had taught him back on the rez), siphoned some gas into it and was on the road just as the sun was setting. He thought he might meet them coming back but he got all the way to the lake without passing a soul.

  At the lake he skirted the moon-bleached shore slowly in the truck, finally found the wolf-dog washed up in the shallows of a rocky bay, canoes stacked up against the trees like coffins. They’d shot her in the side of the head. What the water hadn’t washed away of her blasted brains and skull was matted in her pelt. Her tongue hung out, already beginning to swell. He wrapped her in a blanket, loaded her into the passenger seat. He sat on the hood under the pale moon, fumbled for the book of matches he’d got at the Trap and lit a cigarette, then another one, until the clouds blew up and the moon disappeared behind them with a yellow wink that was goodbye.

  Back in the warming-up truck, blowing on his hands, Gene felt a part of the world curl itself into a ball and roll away from him. He felt one minute full of purpose, the next cut away from things, rolling away. Beside him on the passenger seat was something—not Gloria—he couldn’t look at. He started up the truck, turned onto the lake road and hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he heard the rattle. It hadn’t been there before—something must have come loose on the rough road. He found a flashlight in the glove box and got out, the wind keen in his ears. The truck bed was empty, nothing but coon turds and a coil of frayed rope. Gene lay down on his belly and shone the light under the chassis. It picked up an angular shape hanging down a few inches above the ground but before he could get a good look, the flashlight dimmed and the battery died. He cursed and put it aside, lit a match and reached in to pry the shape loose but it would not come. He went back into the truck for a wrench, waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and crawled back under. He pulled the metal box, which had come loose from the wires crudely attaching it to the chassis, out onto the road and stared at it. Earl’s old red toolbox. He remembered it from when he was a boy, hadn’t seen it or one like it in all these years. It came back to him now, that hunger he’d felt for it, the shiny red box with its cluttered contents—tools for fixing and for destroying—its secret compartments and pull-out tray. Seeing it now brought back all those old feelings of creeping shame and dread, a kind of hell-sickness that followed him wherever he went, squeezed him between sea and shining sea so that he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Steam billowed from his mouth; his fingers were stiff with the cold, his hair ropy around his face. He found a rock and used it and the wrench to break the lock, panting with the effort, sweat dripping beneath his jacket. And he saw them then, the diamonds. They caught the glare of starlit cloud and threw it back at him in a flash of white light. A dozen diamonds, maybe more, from small to middling. He picked out a big one and held it up to the sky, each surface giving him a different view of the speeding clouds. He put it back in real slow. In the tray beside the stones were some small pliers and a greasy paper bag containing twisted scraps of gold and silver that had once been the settings for the diamonds. He pulled on the tray by the central handle. It stuck, finally jumping out so that he had to catch it in both hands, and there at the bottom of the box, nestled in a chamois, were the ears.

  Dried rags of flesh, right and left ears, some clearly female, others sprouting hairs. Some had shriveled and darkened over time, others looked fresher, waxen, dried blood in the grooves, cartilage poking through the rotting flesh. All with piercings, singular or multiple. Beneath them was a box-cutter, the kind you get at Wal-Mart, the blade sheathed. Gene squatted beside the toolbox for a while, feeling the heat rise in his face, his heart pounding, and he remained that way for so long that when he tried to put the tray back in, his fingers would not work. He blew on them, rubbed them together and then awkwardly scooped up the diamonds, dropped them into his pocket. He packed the toolbox back up and walked down
to the lake. He dropped the whole thing in, the box of ears with the box-cutter like the tomahawks buried beside the warriors of old. Afterwards he took a cigarette from his packet, split open the paper and sprinkled tobacco over the water in the only blessing he knew.

  He drove back slowly, Gloria beside him for the last time. He stopped on the way home at a truck stop to raise a glass—never another to take her place—then buried her in the woods behind the blackberry patch. He thought of burying her baby teeth along with her, the ones he wore on a cord around his wrist, but he couldn’t bear to part with them. Take care of the farm for me, Gene said as if she could still hear, and the words came back to him then across the endless road and years: our maker has called thee home and thither will we follow. He palmed the matches, thought of burning the place to the ground, the barn and crops and house, but it would be his and Jesse’s one day if Buzz did not get his hands on it first. Like Jesse said, never trust a junkie, and he would know—lame since Ty, high on China flake, ran the ATV over him down by the old twisted pine.

  Gene dismantled her enclosure before dawn. He put the diamonds in a baggie, all except the one he left on the kitchen table for Auntie, yeah, so she’d know. By first light he was on his way, but not back east. Not yet. The Chevy, it’d make the coast or near enough and he’d figure it out from there. City of Angels. It had been a while.

  7//: Slash

  Sometime in the night back in the Spill City trailer, Norma had woken up and eaten the last churro but in the morning had no memory of doing this, or of anything else. She tried to shrug the burn out of her shoulders, her night with Bunny slowly coming back to her. Calling Mommy down at the beach. Half-falling over some kid outside the payphone.

  After another blackout she came to with blood under her nails that she could not explain. Norma howled in frustration. Rain chipped at the roof. Was it morning? Which morning? She lay there in a sweat, a free-floating panic squeezing the breath from her chest. A constant headache scratched at her temples—she felt the VIPr leaking into her brain. Maybe Mommy was right. Maybe on Earth you think with your hole.

  It had been so long since she’d seen the Guy from the train but increasingly she felt him there, saw him in her dreams, woke up scissoring her legs together. The tide was out. She could hear it in the muffled swish of the surf and the desperate call of the birds stuck in the slick like bugs on fly paper. She groped in the dark for her water bottle, tried to drink it lying down and wound up squirting it out her nose. She sat up flailing and feeling foolish. Laughed at herself before anyone else could, even if there were someone else here with her, which there never was. She wiped her face with her sleeping bag and switched on the light, wrapped the sleeping bag around her and padded out of the bedroom. She felt starving but at least the sugar-fried smell of the churros was gone, thank Elvis for small mercies, which is what Gene used to say, and remembering him, she thought again of ditching the mission and heading back up to LA but with what? What, invoking Mommy’s leer in the bathroom mirror, would you tell him? About your appetites? Yes, creature, telling him the one about the hunger. Go back to Gene, the big lug with the lovable laugh—Mommy’s alliterative frenzy frying the line—and tell him about the hungry monster inside you. The daughter pregnant with her Mommy. She pulled the cabinet mirror open, slammed it shut again. She pointed an imaginary pistol at the mirror.

  Abomination.

  Norma went out of the trailer naked in her sleeping bag and stood shivering in the clearing looking out to sea. The outlines of the dawning world had spread like a bruise and beyond the rail, the red tide rolled in unending. Norma sniffed her fingers and began to cry.

  The Silence (n) i. Pre-Quaternary slang word of unknown origin, possibly referring to the terror of the void or of time conceived as a region at the forgotten edge of matter. A panic-induced post-verbal state, sometimes permanent, induced by the perceived proximity of death and the possibility of coming face to face with one’s future, no longer extant self, who paradoxically would not know what it was, and whose specific agony would be in fulfilling an impossible imperative—to remind one’s past self of one’s future death. A state known in early Earth symbolic logic as memento mori. ii. Also associated with the early Nilean Voyages, to apply to those whose Whole (see below) was irretrievable upon return, as opposed to those who did not return at all.

  (Saurum Nilea, AQn., trans. L.Shay 2656)

  8//: the fall

  The one mirror in the trailer had white flecks along the edge where a previous resident had stuck SLA decals. Norma regarded her hulking nakedness in the mirror. Her linebacker’s shoulders with their bony stumps. Blue-black nipples. Rounded belly, dark fuzz below. The Bakersfield transformation had been more brutal than she’d thought. Every cell a white heat, and even now side effects too troublesome to mention. She turned away from the glass, dressed quickly. Pulled on her boots, fastened the long row of rivets, spat on the titanium caps and buffed them up against her jeans. Headed into the night, clenching her pelvic floor muscles as she always did. For luck.

  It was a frozen January. She’d hoped, shivering alone in the trailer, that the worst of the season was over, and she knew it wasn’t. Because always, through the toxic rain and the sleet, the icy wind and the sudden dark that fell like a trap, she could feel him near, smell him at the edge of an unbroken dream. The Guy. She headed south along the tracks, crossed the highway and kept walking until she got to a narrow canyon on the other side of the lagoon. A road wound its way through an abandoned office park dominated by a disused trailer factory, now home to nootropic drug labs, cage fighters, Karaoke bars, obscure churches and inexplicably smoldering piles of scattered debris. On the other side of the old Interstate, she could see the remains of a shopping center, a few cars picked to their bones at the edge of a vast parking lot.

  Norma went in through the cavernous loading dock, fist-bumped the Samoan security detail. Past hotware peddlers, masseuses, barbers and filmmakers, then up four flights of stairs, and across a creaking catwalk that swung out over the dark sea of reclaimed workshops and arrested production lines. Laundry flapped. Lights winked at the horizon where cargo elevators inched up and down ferrying a new kind of middle man—cleaners, technicians, agents, engineers. This was the Factory.

  A guilty silence hung over the place. High on the catwalk above the muted chaos Norma breathed in a familiar smell of sauerkraut and onions masked in frangipani oil. She stepped off and stood before a door, nodded to the Balinese stick puppet that swung tenuously from a nail, its costume faded to a deep sepia and its face rubbed off to a rough sheen. A muffled clang of metal plates and bars floated up from the gym far below, an underground boot camp for minders and militia and gladiators-for-hire—Cartel or Consortium. It didn’t matter to them.

  It didn’t matter to her either. Her stomach growled and she followed her nose through the door into Una’s bar. Edged past the scattered clientele without attracting any apparent attention, except for one pair of steroid-addled eyes that she steadfastly ignored. Biofluorescent candles glowed desultorily in the booths. An armed holoscreen above the bar replayed a Chargers game. On another, on the other side of the room, played a lingerie cooking show. She ordered a beer and watched a man in white shoes set up the Karaoke.

  Little Barry swung down from his perch at the end of the bar, stepped up onto a cinder block, pulled her a beer, and shoved the mug in front of her. His flesh hung in folds over his eyes, one of which had a sideways cast to it. His wife, Una, ducked her head into the pass window behind the bar. She glared at Norma with chipped button eyes in a face red as rubber, a boiling ball of rage and defeat stirred by the rage and defeat she saw in her old man and could not cure. Little Barry had taken over the bar after winning a bet but for his sins it remained too high for him, everything beyond the reach of his little tattooed limbs so that he had to set up a row of cinderblocks beneath the bar and solder ladders to tracks along the walls to reach the hard liquor.

  – Meatballs, said Norma.
And potatoes.

  Little Barry looked at her blankly and twiddled a finger in his ear. Flushing, she repeated the order, careful to move back into men’s speech. He pulled a curser from behind his ear and jabbed at a scratched console, rocked to the pass window on his little midget legs and yelled out the order to Una anyway. It was more than a skewed sense of scale. Norma imagined the previous owner a Titan, the ground trembling beneath his hoary hooves. Everything in the bar larger-than-life. Dinner plates the size of Flyer wheels, beer mugs like buckets and cutlery like it came from a Throne of Thorns set. Maybe it had. Serrated edges on the knives caught the light like dragon teeth.

  – You heard that? came a bellow from the other end of the bar too loud in the sodden hush. Carna del burro for the little lady. Taking a break from the cock du jour?

  Norma turned to the speaker who along with two others seemed to have been formed from the darkness itself. Their eyes glowed a yolky yellow, consoles bobbing in their hands like little blue ghosts. Norma recognized them as some knuckle-dragging Roidheads from the gym below—Cartel goons, rogue militia. Again she told herself she didn’t care. Not her lookout.

  – Halt den Mund! snapped Una. Banging around in the stone-age kitchen.

  Signed pictures of Lady Madonna and Blanket Jackson III and other obsolete celebrities gathered grease on a paneled wall. The man who’d yelled raised his glass to Norma. His forearm ballooned out cartoonishly, the skin stretched over muscles crawling with fresh ink. Overhead, she heard a drone hover and buzz away, its lights blazing through holes in the vaulted roof. The wing stumps at her shoulders had begun to burn. And also sometimes there was blood on her hands and she had no memory of how it got there.