The Antichrist of Kokomo County

by David Skinner

  Which brought her to the thing Sparky had supposedly done.

  “He made the fan spin,” she said.

  The ceiling fan in his bedroom, she meant. The ceiling fan that hadn’t worked since we’d moved into the house. The ceiling fan I had been promising to fix for years now.

  Penny said she walked into Sparky’s room where he was sitting on the floor, staring at the wall—in her words—“like a psycho.” Above him, the ceiling fan was spinning.

  The wife, thinking I had finally fixed the fan went to turn it off. She flicked the switch. The fan didn’t stop. She flicked it again. The fan didn’t stop.

  Sparky then purportedly giggled and said, “Grandma sucks pee-pees in Heck!”

  Hearing this, the wife ran out of his room and into ours, lost her shit, and I, now fully apprised of the situation, lurched out of bed and lumbered off to the boy’s lair.

  When I got there, I found him not sitting on the floor but by the window. He was staring out of it, but not in a way I thought “psycho” at all. He looked kinda sad to be honest.

  Above him, the fan wasn’t moving.

  “I swear to God it was moving before, Frank,” the wife said, trailing in behind me. “I swear it.”

  I flicked the switch. The fan didn’t move. I flicked it again. The fan didn’t move. The wife started crying. I left her to her pathetic tears and approached Sparky.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said. “Did you make the fan spin earlier?”

  Without ever looking at me, Sparky considered this question and clicked his tongue. He then pushed his nose against the window and, glum as can be, said, “Who cares?”

  6

  The Inner Sanctum is filling up—at least if one wants to sit on a chair or the sofa. We could fit another twenty people or so in here as long as they didn’t insist on being seated.

  Roll call: Danica, the goons, Reverend Phipps, Sparky, and myself. All present and accounted for.

  After hearing the spinning fan story, Phipps had called Danica and the goons in to join us as I repeated it, and they all exchanged looks, scratched their heads, and hemmed and hawed.

  Perhaps the most perplexing aspect to the scene is Sparky. I’m talking about him—the peculiar things he’s done, and the peculiar things that have happened around him—but he continues to appear oblivious. He has not looked up once from his drawing and made a single nod or facial tic that would signify awareness that he is the center of the discussion, nor has he attempted to correct any part of my narrative.

  He is behaving like there’s nobody in the room but him, and man, is he ever going to town on that paper and smiling smiling smiling.

  I have to admit this is the happiest I’ve ever seen him.

  7

  The happiest anybody’s ever seen me: Saturday, November 6th, 2004 at 11:07 a.m.

  That’s right. I know the date and time to the minute. Don’t ever say we manic depressives can’t appreciate happiness. We can. A little too well.

  I had been out of my latest fog for a long time now, a year and a half plus, and though the next fog wasn’t too far down the road, there was no way I could have known that then.

  Times were good. The best they’d ever be. The wife and I were fresh off another massive win over Sparky and the Chicago Cubs, who, after collapsing in such legendary fashion in the playoffs the previous season, had decided to fold the last week of the regular season this year, losing five of their last seven games, thus eliminating themselves from postseason contention and saving the wife and me a ton of worry and prayer and God knows what else.

  Penny was training for a half marathon and was looking as svelte and sexy as ever. I had been half hoping for another stressful Cubs postseason, entirely for the chance to see her dancing around in the buff again. I was even joining her on some of her runs as well as eating the healthy meals she was preparing and as a result I had gotten rid of a great deal of my blubberish belly.

  Sparky, on the other hand, was ballooning splendidly from all the burgers and pizza and French fries and milkshakes we kept plying him with and, perhaps brought on by the frustration of the latest Cub meltdown, was sporting a fresh bald patch on the back of his head, making him look more aged and wretched than ever. Furthermore, his grades were still wonderfully below average, and better yet, we weren’t doing his homework just well enough for him to get a by-the-skin-of-his-teeth passing grade anymore—he was doing this on his own.

  He was involved in no activities and sports. He had no friends to speak of.

  As I said, times were good. Strike that. Great. The best they’d ever be.

  More great stuff:

  The old man was out of the picture for once, utterly caught up with his new life, wife, and son, who at the time was two years old and had yet to demonstrate any hints of being a genuine fucking genius.

  At work the previous week, I had gotten my idea approved for a springy, pliant spoon that would help people better scrape food from the bottom of bowls.

  You know: Bendy Spoon.

  In contrast, my archenemy, Fred T.C. Hoover Jr., was suffering from creative block due to his recent separation from his wife, the previously mentioned Miss Indiana runner-up. The split had come after her recent explicit turn in Hustler, an issue every male at work had tormented Fred with whenever he would chance by their desks.

  Oh, what happy days.

  But even all that could not make me the happiest I’d ever been. There needed to be a little more for me to go from happy to happier to happiest. And as the Lord would have it (He and I were getting along famously then) I got that final boost on Saturday, November the 6th, 2004 at 11:07 in the morning.

  I know, I know. The madness. Just say it already. All right, all right:

  I published a poem.

  8

  The Antichrist of Kokomo County

  The beast in first form

  As fat child, burps burger, toots

  Does mankind tremble?

  To be fair, it was the most modest of modest successes, as even the best haikus tend to be. The magazine that accepted “The Antichrist of Kokomo County,” The Vincennes Quarterly Review, had a circulation of about four and didn’t pay anything. But hey, it was my first stab as a writer and I had managed to get something published right out of the gate. And the VQR people loved “my little whimsy,” as I called it. They thought it was funny. They even published it in the Giggle Issue because they thought so highly of it, a fact that sent my soul a-soarin’. And just how many competitors had I dusted along the way, eh? How many verses and stories and vignettes had been rejected to make room for mine?

  At last, others had been denied because of me, and standing there with the acceptance letter in my hot little hands, it began to occur to me that being funny might be my path to greatness, that abandoning that quality in myself in school had been a terrible mistake.

  And the best part of being great for being funny?

  Everybody likes you.

  *

  So there I was: the happiest I’ve ever been. My mind was racing with all the endless possibilities now in front of me. I am embarrassed to say I was so over the moon at that moment that I raised my arms in celebration. I am just as abashed to say I shouted out in joy and laughed in bliss before strutting back into the house, a changed man.

  I got as far as the threshold of the living room before my celebration ended, before joy and bliss departed from me, perhaps never to return. Once more, alarm and dread became my companions. Doom and calamity my cohorts.

  The wife was seated on the couch, shuddering. She was mumbling to herself. She was covered in bird shit.

  She had gashes and cuts all over her face and neck, and I, ever the devoted husband, tended to her wounds. I used a soapy washcloth to clean off the bird shit and blood. I applied bacterial ointment to the cuts and gashes to speed healing and prevent infection
. I served her a couple of shots of whiskey (typically reserved for sore throats and a certain somebody’s fogs) to help even out the trembles and the mumbles. I then put on the best look of concern I could muster and asked her what happened.

  To which, with more shudder and mumble, the wife lifted a blood-stained hand and crooked a finger out of the living room window at our son in the front yard, seated on a tire swing.

  “H-he did,” she murmured.

  When I reached him at the tire swing, Sparky was staring off into the distance again—which is to say, into nothing. Before I could get a word out, he started swinging.

  “Is Mom all right?”

  “Yeah, she’ll be fine.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t tell if he was pleased by this news or disappointed. When someone is swinging on a swing, it’s tough to get a read on their facial expression unless it’s an extreme smile or frown. Whatever look was on Sparky’s face, I couldn’t glean it. His swinging back and forth made him a blur to me.

  “Is it true what happened to her, son?” I said. “Did you tell a bird to attack her?”

  Back and forth Sparky went, quiet as can be.

  Not in the mood to wait around for him to take his sweet time in answering me, I stepped behind the swing to stop it, and it was here that Sparky did the unthinkable—at least, the unthinkable as far as I was concerned, as I didn’t think of it.

  He jumped off the swing and ran.

  Now, you wouldn’t think that a fat child—even if he is the Antichrist—running at top speed would be able to put much distance between himself and a grown man who has been doing quite a bit of jogging of late.

  And you would be right not to think that. I caught Sparky after about five steps.

  Sparky was squealing with laughter when I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to the ground. “Tickles?” he said.

  “Give me an answer first,” I said, not tickling Sparky, but not ruling it out. I knew I had to dangle the potential for tickling in trade or else he wouldn’t feel obliged to answer me.

  “What?” Sparky said. “What did I do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”

  “Tickles!”

  “Answer my question first. Did you tell a bird to attack your mother?”

  “Oochie-coochie!”

  “Answer me!”

  “Ha haaaaa!”

  I grabbed Sparky by the shirt again, pulled him up to my face, and boomed another “ANSWER ME!”

  Much like he had every other time I had employed some BOOM in his direction, I expected the boy to cry, but this time he seemed unfazed by Angry Daddy’s Boomy Voice. He screwed up his face in contemplation, perhaps mock, perhaps not, and said, “Uh, I don’t think I did.”

  9

  “Oh, horserabbit!” the wife said, dipping a scrubby sponge into a bucket. “Oh, bullsocks!”

  “I’m only telling you what he said,” I replied.

  “And you believe him?” she said, flicking water from the scrubby sponge in my direction. “Over me?”

  I had come back into the house to find the whiskey bottle empty and the wife furiously cleaning the master bathroom tub.

  “No, I’m not saying you’re wrong, honey—”

  “Not wrong. Lying!”

  “I’m not saying you’re lying.” I opened the bottom cabinet and took the second scrubby sponge that had come with its brother in the package of two and, with it, started in on the sink. “All I’m saying is this might not have been what it appeared to be.”

  “What part of a bird flying from Sparky’s hand and pecking my face off is not what it appears to be?” the wife said as angrily as she was scrubbing.

  Nonplussed, I stopped my own scrubbing. Soap and dirt were now commingling in the sink. I would need to rinse them down the drain soon or they’d dry that way. Together. The good and the bad.

  “The bird flew off his hand?” I said in disbelief.

  “And pecked my face off,” the wife said, turning on the shower to wash away the orgy of soap, dirt, pubes, and mildew that were romping together in the tub. She had done that for the same reason I needed to rinse my orgy in the sink, and soon.

  “What was Sparky doing with the bird on his hand?”

  “Whispering to it!”

  The wife climbed out of the tub and started washing the outside of it.

  “Creepy whispers?” I asked. I had resumed scrubbing and the orgy of bubbles and scum in the sink had gotten impressively large. Not one part of it was untouched by the debauchery.

  “What do you think? Yeah, creepy whispers!” the wife said.

  “And so you—where were you?” My orgy had now spread to the countertop.

  “I was by the back door, watering the dogdang flowers.”

  “And so you looked up, saw Sparky whispering to a bird on his hand, and then it up and flew after you?” (I was trying to avoid the part where she’d gotten pooped on.)

  “That’s right.”

  With about fifteen hundred paper towels, the wife wiped away the orgy on the outside of the tub and started on the floor.

  “What kind of a bird was it?” I said, finally rinsing clean the sink and countertop.

  “I don’t know, a brown bird,” the wife said. “A little brown bird came at me.”

  “A little bird made all those marks on your face?” I said, spraying the bathroom mirror with Windex.

  “Most of them, yeah.”

  “What do you mean ‘most of them’? Where did the rest come from?”

  The wife paused to make a face at the overwhelming Windex smell. “Some of the marks might have come from my fingernails, okay? But I was scared out of my mind, trying to get the bird off my face!”

  The wife was now using another too-many-paper-towels wad to wipe the linoleum clean. Somewhere, trees wept.

  “So some of those scratches are from you?” I said, using a single sheet to clean the Windex off the mirror, demonstrating how little paper towel was necessary in order to get the same result.

  “What difference does it make if some of the scratches came from me?” the wife said.

  “Seems like you or the bird would have really had to go to town in order to get some of those marks. Just strange is all,” I said, trying to get too much out of my single sheet of paper towel and smearing Windex all over the mirror.

  “Are you saying I did this to myself?”

  “No, I’m getting all the relevant information.”

  “Oh, is that so?” the wife said, shaking her enormous paper towel wad in my face. “Well, here’s some more relevant information for you, Mr. Man. The reason my fingernails were able to scratch my face up so well is because you asked me to keep them long and sharp so I can scratch your back up during dirty stuff!”

  “Are you saying this is my fault?”

  The mirror was almost done. I was thinking it was time to get out of the bathroom before I got saddled with toilet duty.

  “As much as it is mine. You think I did this to myself for some reason, which is ridiculous, so I’m doing the same thing by saying you made me keep my fingernails long because you knew this would all happen.”

  “So you think Sparky and I are plotting with birds to hurt you?” I said.

  “Why not? It’s just as plausible as me doing this to myself for whatever whacked-out reason you’ve come up with.”

  The wife tossed her massive paper towel wad into the trash and her face changed.

  “Toilet time,” she said.

  We took a break from our discussion to play Rock, Paper, Scissors for the pleasure of not being the one to scrub the toilet.

  I picked scissors. The wife picked rock.

  I said, “Best two out of three.”

  The wife left the bathroom.

  10

  “Let
me get this straight. Your wife said a bird attacked her?” Danica says, her eyes narrowed skeptically, her arms folded doubtfully.

  “That’s correct,” I say, my arms unfolded, my eyes doing nothing.

  “You didn’t see the bird attack her?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then how do you know for sure it happened?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But I believe it did.”

  Danica scoffs. “Have you ever seen your son do any of these strange things?” she says. “Has it ever occurred to you your wife is off her rocker and is making this stuff up?”

  “Why would she make up something like that?” I say.

  If I tell Danica the truth, that I, too, have wondered from time to time whether the wife was making up stories about Sparky in order to justify what was being done to him, then I might also be forced to speak about our design to thwart the Antichrist from the beginning of his life, not to mention my recent decision to maybe kill him. I don’t think that would be such a good idea to bring up, so I pretend such a notion is outrageous.

  “That’s crazy,” I say. “Do you think she wanted her son to be the Antichrist?”

  “Michael?” Phipps says. “Did you send a bird after your mother?”

  It finally seems to have dawned on somebody in this room to go to the one other person who has been involved in all of these events. Why it didn’t dawn on me, I couldn’t tell you.

  Oh, wait, yes I could. Here’s why:

  Sparky looks up from his drawing and says, “I like birds.” Then he adds, “They fly around, and I wish I could fly with them.”

  Phipps’s face falls. Danica snorts. “No disrespect here, but this kid’s mentally defective or something,” she says. “Not to mention a pervert.”

  “My dear, feel free to adjourn back to your desk and finish your secretarial duties for the day,” Phipps says.

  “You got it, Reverend,” Danica says, getting up. As she leaves, I can’t help but imagine a very spirited game of Grabass.

  “Why are we even listening to any of this?” Danica says, whirling around. “When it’s clear this doofus is the father of that kid? Lord Lucifer couldn’t have possibly made such an ugly little troll.”