American Monster

by J. S. Breukelaar

  – Shauest nicht ’runter, Norma heard Una hiss from behind the window. Nieder schauen ist zu fallen.

  But the urchin did not look down. She crawled along another few feet then stopped just under where the blade pierced the wood beneath the skylight. Norma’s arms hurt from holding them out. The urchin stood up, clutching a vertical pipe that disappeared into the blackness, its peeling white paint stark in the laser beam. She swatted at the knife and Norma swatted the air in mime, the shadow of her fingers clawing the wall. She saw with a grim clarity how fire had melted the material of the pipe and reformed the outer coating to a blistered and deceptive glaze. There was another pipe behind it, invisible in the darkness and distance, but Norma’s brain knew it was there. The urchin could see it—a slim copper water pipe probably a hundred years old but intact.

  Norma held her breath. The urchin scrabbled for the copper pipe and fumbled, grabbed the white electrical pipe in her panic. She cried out and swung, the pipe disintegrating in one hand as the other reached the knife and let it fall through her fingertips. Tiny drops of blood turned to mist. The fall of the child through forty feet of dark was also—other than the hollow pop of a young skull against a lower beam and the mocking ring of the blade hitting the floor—totally silent.

  This is what it sounds like. The silence of the fall. Not so much as a howl or a sob. Just a terrible hole in the fabric of sound. Norma was kneeling beside the urchin’s body without knowing how she got there. Augustine had dropped wide-legged onto the edge of the bar. Behind him Little Barry peered ashen-faced. The urchin’s eyes were white slits and a dark bubble of blood teased out of her mouth with every shallow breath.

  Witnesses would describe it as a single movement, how Norma picked up the steak knife from the floor, scooped the child into her arms, smashed the lackey’s nose with her elbow, pinned Augustine’s scrotum to the bar with the knife, grabbed the bet money and was gone. The men would later put it down to a trick of the light, random adrenal static, the way her form broke up and blurred, strung out in pieces across time and space, the way she seemed to be both here and dimly adumbrate, there.

  She’d had her wings genetically clipped prior to arrival. That was standard because retractability was difficult to encode at the level of DNA. But the unplanned transformation in Bakersfield caused a slight regression in the RNA, enabling a mutation of the gene. Her brain remembered the wings as tusks and summoned them under duress. They burned uselessly now beneath the jacket, bone tearing through flesh. She contemplated running back to the trailer, but even at the speeds she was capable of, there would be no time and it would attract attention. The urchin’s face was petal-white, jammy matter leaking from her skull. Norma could hear a Coaster rocketing up from TJ. It would not stop. All but invisible in the jacket, she was at the tracks in time to jump the train with the urchin clutched to her breast, her boots and one arm locked to the fuselage, the wind whipping a web of blood across the urchin’s stricken face. Her eyes flew open, racing clouds twinned in their un-perceiving depths. Closed again. Norma jumped off at the camping grounds and landed in a pulsing crouch to lessen the impact on the child. She stuck to the shadows, veered past the twins spooning in their army blanket beneath the old pine. The usual scatter of trailers had pulled into the park under the cover of darkness and the old leasing building was ringed in lumpy shadows, the disembodied glow of cigarettes, the tang of opiates, wieners. A guitar strummed sadly. The ocean moaned.

  Norma got to the Cheyenne, fumbled the door open and lay the urchin down on her bed, wondering if she should call Mommy for permission, just this once, and knowing there wasn’t time. Bitch’d say no anyway—retrievals were strictly forbidden. Norma awkwardly pushed the urchin’s tawny hair off her face. On the inside of the young wrist ran a track of old scars. The switch around Norma’s neck twinged another warning. She yanked on the cord and howled.

  But it was the age of the child, the way Norma could smell the unspoiled life on her skin, the smell if not of innocence then of something too close to it to call. She composed herself and tried to think, she would not count the lengthening seconds between the child’s shallow pants. It was possible that the lower beam may have broken the urchin’s fall, minimizing the number of broken bones and ruptured organs, but what was clear to Norma was that her brain was boiling from the impact and that it would soon be awash in blood. She brought her trembling fist to the child’s face and extended her index finger a hair’s breadth from the tiny nose. She withdrew her hand, closed her eyes and poked her tongue out. Norma’s tongue ended in a fine point and the slightly curved tip flushed a deep lapis blue. She leaned over the body, the pliant bones and filthy hair. And then her jaw hinged open and she convulsed. Her tongue unfurled, the blue tip a raw and pulsing blue. It hurt like hell, not just the burning blue tip, but also the muscle itself, from deep in her throat, like being caught on a meat hook. She flailed. Her viscera spasmed. She tasted her own tissue, tears stung her eyes and mucus filled her passages so she couldn’t breathe. The tongue elongated, sought the tip of the urchin’s nose and found it. Touched it. The urchin’s eyes flew open. Locked onto Norma’s. Norma’s tongue snaked into the child’s right nostril. Norma choked on her own cry, her head shaking back and forth and her hair whipping at her face. The tongue wormed its way past the urchin’s throat, through the optical cortex and into her brain. Bounded chaos all around, looming ganglia and quivering lobes, starry meninges and sunken medulla, all drowning in blood, a red surge lapping at the disappearing shoreline until Norma’s tongue began to lick it clean, every inch, traversing the bloody world, monstrously and a little shyly, like the leviathan of old.

  9//: crumbs

  It took Gene longer than he thought it would to get over Gloria. Longer than he thought it could. It was impossible not to see her there beside him in the truck, impossible not to hear her snore from the back seat. He couldn’t get the cold-water smell of her pelt out of his nostrils, carried it with him wherever he went. About the diamonds, he’d called the fence in Albuquerque, got a west coast contact and exchanged two of the rocks for some cash that he deposited into Jesse’s bank account for his leg operation. He headed for the coast, sometimes thought of going back to Bakersfield to check on the farm, if Major Buzz had not got his hands on it already. Gene squirmed in the driver’s seat, knew there was some point he was missing, and just kept the setting sun ahead of him so he wouldn’t worry too much about what he’d left behind. Gloria. He finally got to San Miguel and stayed at the old Mission there, Mission Arcángel. He even thought of becoming a monk. Spending the rest of your days in a little cell, sleeping beneath a scratchy blanket and keeping all your worldly shit in a shoebox.

  He kept Gloria’s teeth on a leather bracelet around his left wrist. He took the self-guided tour of the Mission. He stood for hours looking at the statue of St. Michael defeating the devil. The Archangel’s wings spread out like an albatross. From the sixteenth century or something. Dry rot and peeling paint, but the fire in the Archangel’s eyes undimmed. Same friars dusted it every day, basketball player wearing scuffed Nikes that stuck out the bottom of his robes. Gene made friends with the gravedigger who said, Whatever you do don’t call them monks. He taught Gene how to cheat at Klondike. Gene shot hoops with the Nike monk.

  On his last day there, the gravedigger was lighting the candles in the chapel with matches from a matchbook with a familiar logo on the cover.

  – Let me see those, said Gene.

  The gravedigger passed the matchbook to him. It was worn to a soft silky finish, torn on one corner, exposing the root of the matches like rotten gums. The worn logo said The Trap, and had the address in Bakersfield down by the Greyhound terminal. There were only two matches left.

  – You been there? said the old man.

  Gene nodded and said, You?

  The gravedigger shook his head, Never even been to Bakersfield.

  Gene swallowed. He said, Then where’d you get these?

  – A tall drink of
water came through here a couple weeks ago. Maybe three. Father Bryce put her in the retreat. She looked like she’d been in the ring. All cut up and such. SLA whore maybe. I found the matches in her room after she left along with some other comtrash and such.

  When Gene just kept staring at the matches, the gravedigger shrugged and said, Take them. I got more.

  And he lit the rest of the candles with a lighter decorated with the San Miguel insignia—a holographic image of the Archangel in all his wrath. Gene pocketed the matchbook, trying to think about the sort of woman that would patronize a place like the Trap. The ones that he remembered from there, the ones that were actually women, tended to be skinny haunted locals, desperate for a way out and too scared to find it for themselves. This one, the woman the gravedigger described, didn’t sound like that.

  Gene left another one of the diamonds in the collection box and got back in the Chevy that afternoon. He headed south. He stopped for a beer in Pasa Robles, breakfast at a rough-clad farmhouse in Atascadero. A steely sun hung over churned-up fields and charred poles. There was a Winnebago in the yard and the old couple offered him lodging in return for helping to rebuild the barn and some of the outhouses, said both their sons were in Tajikistan. He thought about it for a minute until they told him that a woman had stayed there for a couple of nights and helped them rig the battery to the tractor. Gene said, What woman?

  The old man looked at his wife, and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He described the stranger as unarmed, with dark hair, denim shirt and combat boots. He said she was a help to them, but left some garbage behind they couldn’t use and maybe Gene could. It was all they could offer him. They showed the broken tech she left behind in the trailer, all sorts of consoles and such, even an ancient BlackBerry. Gene said he could stay but a day, helped the couple drag sheeting and tarps and corrugated steel to the charred barn frame. Worked all day in the niggardly light nailing up the scrap into some semblance of a shelter for their shell-shocked mule and orphaned calf, and left at nightfall with a piece of the farmer’s cornbread and a chunk of dried beef. The broken comtrash on the seat beside him in the Chevy and the old worn book of matches in his pocket. He took the matchbook out and opened it for the hundredth time. Read the word scrawled in childish letters on the inside. ‘NORMa’, the first syllable in capitals like the ‘a’ had been an afterthought.

  In bed, the barmaid who worked in a tavern in Cayucos told him about how the weekend past Louis the Lisp and a tall quiet chick with a left-handed hustle got into some pretty dirty dancing. When Gene asked the barmaid if she’d caught the woman’s name she said she thought it was Nora. At a rib joint in Nipomo, the walls of which were branded with the logos of long-gone ranchers, Gene heard talk about the woman who came in on her own and ate an appetizer of oak-smoked ribs, a twenty ounce Spencer steak complete with baked potato and sour cream, a basket of garlic bread, and two bowls of ice cream, strawberry and chocolate. When she was standing at the cash register beneath a set of mounted antlers, the Chumash busboy took her picture. The woman said she’d give him twenty bucks if he’d delete it. When he said what if he didn’t she just looked at him with eyes like a bear trap. So he said thirty and passed her his console and she gave him his thirty. He said the only reason that he wanted her picture was because of where she was standing beneath the antlers—the angle made it look like she had wings. That’s how tall she was.

  Gene found the kid’s phone in some weeds behind the restroom, crushed as if beneath a heavy heel. He picked up clues all along the way, crumbs she’d left seemingly for him, although he knew it just seemed that way. A broken pair of sunglasses from a Motel 6 in Santa Margarita. At the train station restroom in Grover City, a button from her denim shirt. At each spot the description was more or less the same—that of a tall chick said she was from San Luis Obispo, or was it San Simeon? Some bitch with legs to here got run out of Guadalupe for trying that left-handed hustle on the wrong Gringo, busted out of a Lompoc clinic; caught in flagrante with the sheriff of Mission Hills. Mona, Nara, Roma, Nora, Norma.

  Gradually, without him noticing, his grief over Gloria receded and was replaced by the strange connection he felt with this girl called Nora or Norma, always one step ahead of him. He pictured her in flight, wings spread like antlers, like bones. And gradually Gloria returned to him in spirit and in a form or sorts. There she was, not only in the front seat of the Chevy but beside him on the old roads beneath the riven freeways, tail wagging at the scent of a clue or a crumb. She looked a little worse for wear, Gloria did, what with the mess on her head and her matted pelt, but her amber eyes burned yet, fierce and knowing and that’s all that mattered.

  It got too expensive to run the Chevy, so he traded it in Santa Barbara, by which time he’d collected a few more matchboxes she’d left behind, a silver dollar and a wooden crucifix, two arrowheads, some empty pillboxes, a mascara wand, breath mints and a bunch of broken ancient phones, dead consoles. He didn’t think he’d have it in him to leave the Chevy behind, but he did. Took the forty dollars the dealer gave him and mailed it up to the gravedigger at San Miguel. Gene talked about Norma with Gloria, showed her the latest clue he’d picked up and together they worried over the dark road warrior in flight—from what? And to what?

  He tried to figure out what it was that drew him to the mysterious drifter. Why her? Beyond a matchbook from a place they’d both frequented once, oblivious of the other, what was the connection? He told himself that even if he hadn’t been following her, the places she had been were the places he’d be drawn to anyway. Edge-of-life bars, dusty multiplexes and gaming joints. It occurred to him that she, too, could be looking for someone. If so the connection was complete, an ouroboros—Gene, Norma, and another—or an arrow of time leaving randomness in its wake.

  He visited a defunct playhouse outside of Santa Barbara where there had been a sighting. Backstage was a room strewn with mattresses, women sprawled around drinking beer and watching television. Gene stood in the doorway, his shoulders squeezed between the frame. By now he had cooties, a rash behind his knees, had lost twenty pounds. The women were actors, a troupe mostly related to each other, sisters and cousins, grandmothers and aunts. They were Chumash performance artists, acted on their flesh. A woman called Rita lifted an embroidered blouse to show Gene a pattern of cuneiform-like scars on her belly, cuts made by a trusted other. A girl sat over the exposed hump of a crippled woman, carving crimson code in the already scarified skin. Another with cropped white hair bent over the spread thighs of a teenage girl, whittled with a bamboo knife on the soft flesh. Droplets quivered on the cuts like liquid fire. The air in the room rusty with blood.

  They passed him a beer. He asked if they’d seen her, a tall traveler with dark hair and fighting eyes.

  – She came here, said the white-haired woman bent over the girl.

  Rita said how Norma had drunk with them and shared a meal and had wanted them to cut her.

  The white-haired woman lifted her wizened face, a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth. She said something to Gene in a language he couldn’t understand.

  – She says there was no need to cut that one, translated Rita. The tall one.

  When Gene asked why, the woman said, Because her whole body was a wound.

  Wherever he went it was the same. She fought like a man, howled like a wolf, and was gone by morning. No one had actually spoken to her, called out her name. So Gene did. Norma, he said in his sleep, waking up with the sound dying on his lips, the sheets wet and sometimes the pillow.

  Norma.

  Even if he could have bought a new car (and put up with bandits and bridges fallen like Godzilla across the road), traveling by train was simpler than by road and safer. But mainly he took the train because she had. He figured that out. The challenge was to try and go where she went, get off where she did. Gather the pieces of her to himself so that by the time he finally saw her sleeping off a binge on the Surfliner just outside of LA he knew that he’d f
ound her, his broken angel, that this was the one who had kept him going all these weeks, given him something to live for, and he owed her for that. He’d always owe her for that.

  Norma.

  10//: arrow

  – Mommy?

  A head gash sticky to the touch was the sole evidence of her fall. Raye could hear the ocean, so she must be on the beach. In a trailer, holy fiery fuck. Through the narrow doorway of the bedroom annex she could see a high-assed woman bent over a console at the kitchen sick. It was nothing Raye hadn’t seen before but there was a glow to this one, the one they called crazy. Even before Una’s, Raye had seen her raving in alleys and vandalized payphones. Mommy this and mommy that. Pecking at a BlackBerry beneath a strawberry sky. Steel-capped boots washed in spume. Roger that, yeah, over and fucking out.

  Mommy?

  The woman’s voice was not really a voice. Raye sat up, or tried to. Fell back down on the blood-soaked pillow and let out a sob, the pain in her head epic. The woman lowered the console and turned around to face her. Then she straightened to a great height. Raye felt a booming in her ears, saw black at the edge of her vision and felt nailed to the bed. Where the woman’s eyes should be was sticky smoke. Raye focused on a crack in the wall and bunched the bedspread in her fists. If she could live through this. The woman came in holding some pills. There was a jerkiness to her movements and a predatory hunch to her stance.