“That is an outdated interpretation of prophecy, Danica. As you know, the consensus in the church is that the idea of our Lord’s son is metaphorical concerning conception. We are not cockeyed fundamentalists clinging foolishly to myths like our God-fearing adversaries,” Phipps says. “And you will not insult children in my presence.”
“Whatever,” Danica says, turning her blazing eyes on me. “You’re nothing but a liar. You’ve never seen anything this kid’s supposedly done!” she yells, slamming the door behind her.
“Oh yeah?” I fire back into the door. “I saw him bite that bird’s head off!”
The goons and Phipps seem more than a little taken aback. “Uh, he bit the bird’s head off?” candy goon says.
“Yeah. I went into the backyard the day after he sent the bird to attack his mother, and I found him standing there with a headless brown bird in his hand.”
“Where was the head? How do you know he bit it off?” Phipps says.
“Because it was in his mouth.”
Understandably, a silence follows. The goons blink in unison. Phipps strokes his beard.
“Is there anything else, strange or weird, that you yourself have seen the boy do other than bite a bird’s head off?” Phipps says.
“As a matter of fact there is,” I say, pausing for dramatic effect. Phipps smiles, appreciating it, but, at the same time, not taking the bait. The goons, though, can’t handle it. In tandem, they lean forward, licking their lips and rubbing their hands together and I lean forward as well, beckon them to come closer so I can whisper it, so Sparky won’t hear.
“What did he do?” gun goon says, on the verge of losing his mind, it seems.
“He killed his mother,” I say.
PART NINE
“Well, I’ll be. That looks like quite a squall.”
1
Remember that “happiest I’d ever been” garbage? This is the flipside, brace yourself.
Rewind from today, a year or so. I was in my living room, spread out on the couch, watching television.
No, no bear cartoons. A sitcom this time, featuring a naughty though ultimately good-hearted orphan doing various naughty-funny, ultimately good-hearted things that exasperate his foster family while bringing them all together in love and understanding.
I would have changed the channel but I was too anesthetized by a belly full of sweets and booze. I was also lost in a head full of fog.
The old man was there too. He had stopped by with some of Joyce’s excellent homemade macaroons, and in a tick under five minutes I had taken down a baker’s dozen along with a pint glass of half-and-half.
“The holy heck’s the matter with you?” my father had said.
As was par for the course, the old man had an ulterior motive for coming over, other than to provide the materials for my astonishing cookie blitz. He wanted to show me a photo album of the little brother (note: my father never brought the little brother over) and brag about him.
Even though I had garnered some pretty thick skin when it came to the incredible feats of my precocious younger sibling, I had no defense for what my father had decided to unburden himself of that afternoon.
“This is it, son,” he’d said. “He is Him.”
The old man was in the midst of showing me an earlier incarnation of the little brother: as a three-year-old in the bathtub wearing the biggest goddamned smile nobody has any right to.
“He’s barely seven years old, Dad,” I said. “How do you figure?”
“I just do,” the old man said. “Call it a father’s intuition.”
To this, I crammed a fourteenth macaroon into my rapacious maw, and washed it down with bitterness (and more half-and-half).
“I was getting worried, you know,” the old man continued. “Was beginning to think I’d heard the Lord wrong and I wasn’t going to live to see it.”
“So what decided it?” I said, my voice heavy with milk fat and long-term paternal resentment. “Was there some sort of angelic visitation or did little bro just react better to that human pyramid crap?”
My father answered this with the loudest goddamned laugh nobody has any right to.
“What a funny day that was, Frankie. We were both fumbling around trying to find our way, weren’t we?”
Down the hatch went cookie number fifteen. “Yep. Good times.”
“I know, they really were when you think about it, and at the end of the day all water under the bridge,” my father said, tapping another photo, this one of the little brother in full t-ball gear and wearing the same unjustly rapturous look. “And now we are both going to witness something special, something great.”
“You can witness it all you want,” I said, “I have my own family to take care of.”
“I know you do, son, and I’m proud of you for the most part.”
Shut! went the photo album.
“You know, for a little while there, I really thought it might be Michael,” the old man said.
“Sorry to let you down,” I said.
“Oh—hee—son, you didn’t let me down.”
I turned my head to look at him. After all that had happened between us, I didn’t think he could do anything to surprise me anymore, but he managed to here. With a loud “Oof!” he got up from the couch, wheezy-hee’d exactly twice, and then proceeded to genuflect in front of me. As one might expect, such a humiliating, painful-looking posture was accompanied by tear-filled eyes (and a fart).
“You’ve never let me down, Frankie. And neither did—hee—Michael.”
I’m ashamed to say that seeing my father on bended knee, looking at me with such billowing love, couldn’t help but make my eyes well up too, even though I knew this was a sham. My father’s affection was borne of the kind of squishy altruism you feel toward another person only when everything is going right for you.
“You’ve done the best with what the good Lord gave you, son, and I have no doubt—hee—Michael will also do his best with whatever measure he’s been given,” the old man said, rising to his feet. “And—hee—while there can only be one Great Horvath, that doesn’t mean there can’t be some pretty durn good ones too.”
I, quite emotional in the midst of this fog, let tears dribble down my face, and when the old man pulled me in for a hug, I may have even let out a sob.
I was heartbroken, angry, insulted, but somehow comforted by what he had told me. It was soothing to know I could still be a Pretty Durn Good Horvath. Yet, I was still pissed and miserable.
What a mélange of emotions the heart can hold at the same time!
Why was I so pissed? So miserable? At no point had my father said he’d ever believed the Great Horvath might be me.
The hug now over, I was back on the couch. The old man had decided to stick around for a bit and was fast asleep on the recliner.
I was alone again in my fog, full of cookies and a few handfuls of jalapeno-cheese crackers. My brain was soupy with television.
Moments ago, I had gotten off the phone with the wife, who was now on her way home from a parent-teacher conference.
“How’d it go?” I had asked her sleepily, junk-food drunkily.
“Not good,” she’d said. “Not good at all.”
Did I detect a note of dread in her voice? An entire symphony, actually. But my numbed, sedated state assured me that she was overreacting as always and that the brisk, friendly colors of a laundry detergent commercial were more important things to consider.
“I’ll be home soon,” the wife continued. “We’ll talk about it then.”
“Sure thing,” I mumbled.
“Make sure you save me a couple of cookies, okay?” she said.
“Wuh?” I asked, but she had already hung up.
That would be the last thing I would ever say to my beloved wife. Wuh?
Not
knowing this, I burped.
In less than ten minutes, I would be a widower.
Not knowing this, I scratched myself.
One week from this day, I would be standing in a graveyard in front of her closed casket, suffering through torrents of inane vapidities from other mourners and trying not to run myself through on a miniature obelisk stationed a few feet away.
Not knowing this, I picked cookie crumbs out of the creases of my shirt and sprinkled them into my mouth.
What a slob.
2
In all fairness to my slovenliness, even before the old man had stopped by with the photo album, it had been a rough day, week, month, two years.
I had once again lost heart, lost my way. The wife had also, to some extent, lost it for a period of time, meaning she too had become something of a slob.
This is what consistent disappointment and failure does: it makes you slobby.
We were losing the war with Sparky. Even with our prayers and schemes, the boy was improving at everything, and we had noticed, perhaps too late, that we were losing control.
The boy had begun to figure out how to circumvent his parents and take certain aspects of his future into his own hands. Hence, the whispers of a friendship with some kid from school. Hence, some significant weight loss over the past year or so, as Sparky, to our amazement, began eating smaller portions of his typical atrocious diet, even asking from time to time for fruit, vegetables, and lean protein, citing information learned from a sit-down with the school nurse. Hence, and worst of all, two B’s on his last report card.
Alarmed by Sparky’s progress, the wife had begun discussing more drastic measures. Pulling him out of Elmo Lincoln and homeschooling him was one option. Pulling up stakes and striking out for a new district was another.
“Maybe a fresh start is what he needs,” she said. “Everybody here knows him too well now. Everybody here is trying so stinking hard to help him.”
Another possible solution was to figure out some way to get Sparky on antipsychotics or sedatives. Dope the kid up, for real this time—not with high fructose corn syrup, caffeine, and Benadryl, but the hard stuff. No more messing around.
Also of concern in those foggy times: the Cubs. They were good again, fresh off a division title after finishing in the cellar the previous year; and although they were promptly swept in the first round of the playoffs, they appeared to be on the brink of a long run of sustained success that I feared would give the wife and me innumerable fits, and could very well pay off a virtue I was not happy to see Sparky still possessed: hope.
Added to this, no more weirdness. Sparky was as behaved and normal as he’d ever been. No more Kamikaze crapping birds. No more mysteriously spinning ceiling fans. No more twenty-four hour crying jags on Christian holidays.
Sparky had even started showing interest in church and had quickly become known in the congregation for singing loudly (and badly) at worship services, attentively listening—or doing a damn good job of faking it—through Reverend Worley’s meandering, point-free sermons, and going to the front for altar calls every Sunday to confess and wash away his sins.
“Don’t be fooled,” the wife had said to me on more than one occasion. “He only wants us to think he’s like us.
“He’s learning to become the Great Deceiver.”
*
What did I think of all this?
Not much.
I was utterly immersed in fog.
3
I was no longer a writer. A poet no more. My dreams of being funny and becoming great for being funny had been dashed.
All funny poems after my first credit had been rejected. Same with all my funny fiction. The most depressing setback was a story I had been convinced was something exceptional—the one I had taken to the mailbox to submit while practically dancing, so sure was I that it would be published and I again seen as great and funny for writing it.
That story?
“The Can.”
It was about this uppity Manhattan billionaire who, with a rumbling tummy and every toilet in a dystopian New York City occupied, has no choice but to take a dump in a trash can.
To this day I don’t get why, but nobody picked it up. Not The New Yorker, not The Paris Review, not even the Vincennes Quarterly, who responded to the story as follows:
“Um, no.”
Silverware design was in the toilet as well. My attempt to piggyback on the success of Fred T.C. Hoover Jr.’s Warrior fork with a Saracen Sword-looking kitchen knife (you know: Sheiky Knife) flopped.
As luck would have it, Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. was still rolling in the bonus money for the Warrior, which had just become the company’s all-time bestseller. He was also still hitched to the Miss Indiana runner-up.
Completely reversing course from his earlier revulsion to her sluttish behavior, Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. made peace with his wife’s turn in Hustler, so well that, in addition to salvaging their marriage, they started their own pornographic website together. For twenty bucks a month anyone with an internet connection could (and can) view photosets and videos featuring Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. having sex with the Miss Indiana runner-up in a variety of exotic positions in a variety of not-so-exotic Kokomo County/southern Indiana locations (such as the Little Hat town dump, a filthy Ponderosa restaurant bathroom, an abandoned Bookmobile, or in the front yard of the Quilters Hall of Fame). As always, classy.
Because of his website, Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. was raking in an extra four grand per month.
“And it helps keep the little lady and I in great shape!” he said.
Even worse, this licentiousness made him more of a hero than ever around the Dagwood offices. Everybody—from the interns to the sales staff to even the big dogs upstairs—thought Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. to be the bee’s knees. Progressive, modern, innovative, notorious, shameless, successful, husband to a drop-dead gorgeous, promiscuous wife. Nobody in the entire state of Indiana was like Fred T.C. Hoover Jr.—much less in Kokomo County.
I hated him more than ever. Not just because of his success at work and certainly not because of his stupid porno site. No, what bothered me was not how he lived his life, nor how he was celebrated throughout the town for it (though these things did irritate), but how he used it all to mock me.
It would seem that somewhere along the line Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. began viewing me as I did him. That is, as an adversary. That is, as someone whose soul he must devour.
This might have stemmed from the low point he experienced back when he had suffered from his own creative block and was oh so close to being divorced from his drop-dead gorgeous, promiscuous wife. It was around that time that he had seen me at my high-water mark, when I had, like Napoleon from Elba, triumphantly returned to Silverware Design with the idea for Bendy Spoon after a temporary banishment to Napkin Patterning. How he must have blistered with envy when my published haiku, “The Antichrist of Kokomo County,” was mentioned at the Dagwood Awards that year, the same ceremony where I received Best Innovation in Silverware Design, the one and only time I’ve won in the fourteen years.
How he must have fumed when he had seen the award-winning Franklin and Mrs. Horvath arm in arm at the company picnic that year while simultaneously imagining his wife mingling other, more private human equipment with those Hustler photographers.
I can’t say that I blame him much for begrudging me my success. Neither he nor I could have known how brief it would end up being. If we had, then perhaps I wouldn’t have been so cavalier in the way I carried myself in those days. Perhaps I would not have sauntered up to Fred’s desk, held up a picture of his wife demonstrating, via engorged cucumber, a remarkable vaginal capacity, and said, “I guess this makes us even there, buddy. I know my life has changed.”
Perhaps he wouldn’t have determined himself to beat me, to humiliate me, at any cost.
As it stands, I did wha
t I did and said what I said. And so did he.
A sampling of the lengths that Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. went to:
After winning the Best Innovation in Silverware Design Award two years in a row, he put the plaques on both ends of his cubicle wall, so that no matter which way I was walking down the aisle, I would come face to face with an award that went to him instead of me.
He also took to decorating his Employee of the Year award—posted by the vending machines—with twinkling Christmas lights, so that when I got a hankering for some Fritos, my attention would be drawn to his name on the award as I am powerless to avert my gaze from things that twinkle.
Additionally, Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. had gotten a bunch of erotic fiction published through his wife’s contacts in the smut biz, and from what I heard (I’ve not read them) they all featured the sexual mishaps and misadventures of a time-traveling putz named Hankie Vorfath, who, in his voyage through the centuries, is ridiculed for his diminutive penis and rejected by every famous woman in history.
Lastly, from what I’ve been told, in those web videos where Fred T.C. Hoover Jr. has sex with his wife (at the Piper Flight Museum, at Schimpff’s Candy Kitchen), after finishing he turns to the camera, wiggles his eyebrows, and says the following:
“Eat your heart out, Horvath.”
The camera then zooms in on the face of his breathtaking wife, and she moans the exact same thing:
“Yeah, eat your heart out, Horvath. Mmmm...”
Somehow, I don’t think Aaron Burr would have had Mrs. Burr do that to Alexander Hamilton. Same with Tommy Edison, his wife, and Tesla. Never would have happened.
4
But back to the couch. There I was, the Pretty Durn Good Horvath, in a fog, staring at a photo of my younger brother.
Was I at bottom? Was this as low as I could go? Not quite. I was in a fog and bummed out, to be sure, but I still felt I had options. I had not given up. I still believed my father was wrong. I still believed I had time to prove him wrong. I was not finished. I was just having a tough go of it. Down deep, I still believed change was right around the corner, right around the bend.
The Antichrist of Kokomo County Page 21