“By keeping him ordinary enough, insignificant enough not to matter too much to anyone ever.”
“You mean, keep him like us?”
I stood up to leave.
“Speak for yourself,” I said, then nudged Sparky. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Sparky stood, angrily kicked the ice, and stomped out of the Inner Sanctum with me. Phipps walked us out the rest of the way.
“It was good to see you again, Frankie. And if nothing else, thank you for a wildly entertaining afternoon.”
“You know I should call the police and tell them who you really are.”
“I should call the police and tell them what you do to your son.”
“Like they’ll believe Satanists.”
“But we’re not Satanists, Frankie, we’re Epistemological Emendationists.”
“Whatever.”
“Indeed.”
We passed Danica’s desk on our way to the front door and Sparky presented her with the final version of his drawing of the field with the grinning boy and the man burning up. The end product included a girl who looked about as close to a Jane Fonda lookalike as Sparky is capable of drawing, holding hands with the drawn boy and leading him away from the fire and the man being consumed by it. And in case there’s any question as to how the relationship between the boy and the girl was to be interpreted by the viewer, Sparky had drawn a heart around the two of them. A heart that, given the boy’s artistic shortcomings, looked more like a butt.
Danica, deeply touched, dropped Sparky’s masterpiece in the wastebasket the second he looked away.
If I was going to follow the original plan, then this would have been one of his last interactions in life, but for some reason killing him no longer seemed necessary or desirable. More than anything, I wanted some of Joyce’s macaroons.
“Before we part ways, Frankie,” Phipps said, “never to meet again, I hope, let me ask you one more thing.”
“Fire away,” I said.
“According to the Bible, what happens after the Antichrist does his thing?”
“You mean after he takes control of the world and kills millions of people?”
“Correct.”
“Christ returns to obliterate him, Satan, and his followers. You know this.”
“Yes, but then what? The end of all evil? Heaven on Earth?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“So a little bit of bad, followed by a whole lot of good?”
“Pretty much.”
“Then riddle me this, Frankie, if all that is true, and your son is what you say he is...why in the world would you want to stop him?”
6
Never in my life has the road ahead looked as clear to me as it does now. Figuratively, that is. In reality, as I drive Sparky back to Little Hat, back to home, a thick fog is rolling in, but in my head and heart the road is clear, extending to the horizon, where the sun, the future, is blazing.
We’ll show you, you goddamned Satanist bastards.
My son will be the end of all things.
The first thing I’m going to teach him is how to study. Flash cards, study guides. I’ll grill him like no father has grilled a son. I will require excellence. I will demand perfection.
Commence your trembling, oh Humankind, there will be an A, or three, on the Antichrist’s next report card. And just you wait until I get him on word power exercises. Memory-builders. The human calculator.
On top of this there will be music to beguile and seduce you—piano, trumpet, guitar. Sparky will learn Hendrix. Miles. Beethoven. He will knock your socks off.
I will get him in shape; the best shape a kid can be in. Running, lifting, calisthenics, Pilates, yoga, karate. He will be the best goddamned athlete in the state.
He will have the highest goddamned SAT score in the country. He will go to Yale, Harvard. He will be picked for the Skull and Bones.
He will be a lawyer. He will work for oil corporations (or solar power). He will go into politics. Democrat, Republican: pick one.
He will consolidate his power from behind the scenes; he will grow in reputation, wealth, and influence; he will become the toast of Washington; he will answer the cries of a desperate citizenry yearning for a savior who will sweep him into the White House. There will be peace and calm and happiness for a short time, until:
KABLOOIE!
Crackling with an excitement I’m certain I’ve never known before, I take the hat off of Sparky’s head and throw it out of the passenger side window.
“And to hell with the Chicago Cubs!” I say.
“NOOO!” Sparky cries.
“Screw those losers,” I say. “When we get home we’re going to get you a Yankees hat, and the jersey of that pretty-boy shortstop of theirs.”
“Yankees suck,” Sparky says. “The Cubs can win it next year if they just—”
“Even if they do somehow figure it out—which they won’t—it’s still not going to change anything. No matter how many times the Cubs win, they’re still going to be losers. It’s their identity and it’ll never go away. What you need is a total sports reboot, son. What you need, only the Yankees can provide.”
“The Yankees are queers,” Sparky says savagely.
“Well, that’s fine son, and so are you. Or at least you’ll need to be. I think.”
“But I don’t wanna!”
“Too bad, it’s in the Bible. And if you don’t like it, take it up with the Almighty.”
“How do I do that?” the boy says.
I can see now where I had it wrong, where I had messed it up—out of pride, out of fear, out of just not thinking it through. The suffering, the starvation, the wars, and the death that will come with the rule of the acme of human evil—it all has to happen.
God mapped it out that way. It is His Will. Who am I to try to stop it?
I mean, it’s not as though we’ve been trying all that hard, anyway. One could even make a compelling argument that all we’ve been up to the last two thousand years has been trying to produce a human being so terrible he could single-handedly bring back Jesus Christ.
Jubilant, euphoric, but also hungry, I park Old Tuna at a hamburger stand in Punchy Hills for an economical, though no less celebratory, junk food dinner.
The boy, to my wonder, orders what the menu calls a “salad cone” along with a small skim milk.
“That’s good, son,” I say, finishing off the first of a trilogy of foot-long chili dogs. “Hitler was a vegetarian too, you know. Maybe you and Eddie can sing about that sometime.”
As Sparky ponders his connection to the Führer, “Eye of the Tiger” starts blasting away from my phone on the dash.
I choose to ignore it for a second so I can radiate with pride at my son—a new experience—and imagine the mushroom clouds and rivers of blood that will herald the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I imagine myself walking through all the destruction and misery, arms raised in triumph. I imagine myself stopping various refugees as they cry out in terror, as they run for their lives.
I’d like to think I’d say this to them:
“Isn’t this incredible? My kid did this.”
“Frankie!” the old man says after I answer the phone. “So glad you picked up. I’ve been dying to talk to you all day.”
“I know, Dad,” I reply good-naturedly. “So what totally awesome, totally tubular thing did he do this time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on now, don’t be coy with me,” I say. “Did Christopher become the first eight-year-old in sports history to sign with a professional soccer team, or did he work out perpetual motion right after getting a Pulitzer for his ‘My Summer Vacation’ essay?”
Sparky, his salad cone finished (not counting what’s all over his front and the floor), is now squirting ketchup packe
ts into his mouth, a fitting symbol for the amount of work I have in front of me. I motion for him to take one of my chilidogs, but he doesn’t acknowledge me.
Meanwhile, my father is laughing way too hard at my sarcasm, defeating it.
“That’s funny, Frankie,” he says. “But actually, I wasn’t calling to tell you about him, I was calling to tell you about me.”
“You?” I say, diverting my attention to the fog outside the car window in an effort to keep the agreeable tone in my voice. “That’s a change.”
“It is, and I am changed. A life-altering experience. A real one this time.”
“Isn’t that something?” I say, starting to finger the grooves of the steering wheel. “Believe it or not, I just had a real life-altering experience, too. You remember Reverend Phipps, right? Well—”
“Frankie, just be quiet and listen to me. I met him.”
“Met who?” I say, wiping gunk from the steering wheel grooves on my napkin.
“Jesus,” the old man says.
Suddenly inspired to turn over a new leaf in the cleanliness department, I begin to pick at crusty, old boogers—the Ghosts of Road Trips Past—from the underside of my seat.
“The Jesus?” I say. “Or a Jesus? Like the guy who runs that taco truck next to the Mini Mart?”
“Ha ha, the Jesus, son. Jesus Christ.”
“Really? The Son of Man Himself. What did he look like?”
“Frankie—”
“Was he like Ted Neeley or like Mom always pictured him? You know, Telly Savalas?”
“It wasn’t a face-to-face encounter, Frankie. It was in prayer.”
With great concentration of effort, I pry a booger loose. Rolling it around in my fingers, I realize it has tenaciously taken some of the upholstery with it and that can’t help but earn my respect. This one is a fighter.
“How do you know you met him then?” I say, flicking the boog out of the window, where it will, I assume, doggedly attach itself to the pavement.
“Trust me son, when you meet him, you know.”
“Kind of like all the other times you said you met him and knew?”
“No, not like those other—well, yes in a way, but—”
“Allow me to get right to it then. Is this the part where you tell me for the billionth time that God told you little bro is going to be the Great Horvath? Because I already saw that billboard.”
“That’s not what I was going to say at all. Actually, Christopher isn’t going to be the Great Horvath.”
“Yeah, right. Who then? Did you get Joyce knocked up again or something?”
“No, son. There is no Great Horvath.”
All attempted booger removal ceases. I’m so surprised it takes a second for me to register that Sparky is holding up one of his fingers to me and that finger is covered with a freshly picked specimen, ostensibly an offering to replace the one I had tossed out the window.
My father continues. “There is no Great anybody. None of that means anything. Not like we think. We were wrong, son, from the beginning. None of what we’ve been driving ourselves crazy over is important. Your wonderful wife, about a week before she got smushed in that car crash, we were talking—and this is so perfect. She quoted me that passage in Ecclesiasticks, the one that says we’re just running against the wind. And—”
“Dad?”
“Yes, Frankie?”
“I have to go.”
“No—listen, a quiet life son—hee! To be humble and work with your hands and—wait, let me—hee!—back up here and—”
Leaving the old man to his stammers, I grab Sparky’s finger and smear the booger on his pants while mouthing a soundless No! Sparky’s face darkens, and I see him struggle to fight back fury.
“No, Dad. You listen to me,” I say. “I’ve got some change to tell you about. This son of mine, Michael, the boy you so thoughtlessly disregarded, the entire reason you remarried and had another kid? Well, he’s about to hand to you the mother of all comeuppances.”
“Hold on a sec—”
“He’s gonna wipe the floor with your precious Christopher. In every category. Stomp his ass flat. Just wait until you see what we’ve got up our sleeves. Just wait until this whole thing plays out. It’s gonna blow your mind.”
“Frankie. Is this how you think of your brother?”
“Yeah, it’s how I think of Christopher. The little fucking twerp!”
I stop to allow my father a moment to deal with the shock of learning something he should have figured out long ago (also so I don’t choke on my own slobber).
“Let me give this another go here,” he says. “Ecclesiasticees. We’re all running on empty. So we must be quiet and humble and help people and—”
“Chrissy is going down, Daaaaad,” I say.
“No—hee!—he’s not, don’t—hee!—talk about your brother like that. Don’t call—hee!—him ‘Chrissy.’ Think about what you’re saying, Frankie.”
“Chrissy gonna get his aaaasssss kiiiiiicked.”
“CHRIST CHRIST JE—HEE!—SUS CHRIST!”
“What?”
“That’s all that matters—hee!—son! That’s all that’s ever mattered! CHRIST CHRIST JESUS CHRIST!”
“HORVATH HORVATH FRANKIE HORVATH!” I yell.
And that’s that.
With the gauntlet officially thrown down to my father, I turn back to Sparky. “Michael,” I say, addressing him by his real name for the first time since maybe ever. “Things are going to be different from now on, I promise.”
“You and me,” I tell him, “we’re going to be great.”
“I hate you,” Sparky says.
“That works,” I say. “As a wise man once said, hate makes you powerful. So you keep that close to your evil, little heart and don’t let it go, okay?”
Clearly not listening to a word I’m saying, Sparky lifts cupped hands to my face to show me the ketchup packet nestled inside. He is smiling wickedly. It’s not bad as that brand of smile goes, but that’s not what I should be encouraging from him. What I need are smiles that beguile, seduce, and attract, and by attract, I don’t mean restraining orders. But before I can offer my critique of his smile, before I can proffer a question about his intentions, before I realize what his malignant smile means for me, my clothes, the upholstery, the windshield, he claps the ketchup packet in his hands and screams,
“GIMME BACK MY CUBS HAT!”
Whether the boy likes it or not, things will be different, and we will be great.
Sparky, for being what he must so that the good times can roll for the rest of us, and me, for helping him be what he must so that these said good times can one day roll.
I expect I will be infamous for a time as the enthusiastic father of the Antichrist. As God cleans up the world and straightens everything out after destroying Sparky and his legions, there might be some backlash for me to endure, some vitriol. But at some point, if the Lord is as good as He is portrayed, He will, at whatever Awards Show in the Sky there is, declare my work, my sacrifice, as perhaps the greatest of all since His own, when He sent His Son and then manipulated everything so He would have to die.
I imagine He will gush on and on and on about what I did in helping to usher in the new Heaven and the new Earth. I imagine at some point all this fuss over me will get a little embarrassing—though I’ll find some way to manage.
Finally, after hours of introduction, hours of praise, days of exalting me (it’s Eternity after all, so there’s plenty of time), an endless succession of fêtes and toasts and dinners in my honor, God will finish with the following:
“This is My beloved son,” He will say, about me, “in whom I am well pleased.”
Then: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the Great Horvath.”
And what will you say then, Dad? From the back row of the cere
mony, Christopher seated beside you, green with envy, holding his gold-foil, God-stamped Participation Certificate with shame? Will you gloat about me then like you do with him now? Will you turn to Mom and lie, “I always kind of had a feeling it was going to be Frankie”?
Will you admit you had nothing to do with it?
And yet, it would be remiss of me if I didn’t grant the possibility that I might be wrong about all of this. That my efforts here, as in everything else, will come up woefully short. That Sparky will be as much a schlep as he was ever going to be. That I will one day die as underwhelming as ever. That all of it—God, the Antichrist, eternal life, and joy—are lies. That there’s no afterlife, good or bad. Or that it’s there, but Sparky isn’t the Antichrist, and I’m a total ass.
Or other fun variations.
Even still, if I’m wrong, if it’s a lie, it’s worth it. Even if Sparky doesn’t become anything more than a villainous checkout clerk, a ruthless UPS man, a cold-blooded lettuce washer, it’s worth it. He may not rape the nations, ravage populations, and gather an army of demons to fight a last stand against God. Maybe the only thing he’ll do is build another Wal-Mart or fuck up some mailboxes. No matter, it’s worth it.
Even if he tops out as the Antichrist of Kokomo County, and nothing more, that will be enough. For him. For me.
At least we tried, right?
7
The fog has engulfed the car as I finish the last of my chilidogs, my face, hair—everything, really—covered in ketchup (the hamburger stand refused me extra napkins). Sparky is fiddling with the radio. He’s skipping a bunch of songs I wouldn’t have minded listening to in order to find one whose lyrics can be changed to his favorite words, eventually stopping on the Turtles’ “Happy Together,” which he sings along to like this:
Imagine PEE and POOP, and POOP and PEE
No matter how dey—la la la, I POOP and PEE
I really like to PEE and POOP, and POOP and PEE
So HAPPEEEEE TOGETH—
“Stop that, Michael,” I say, turning off the radio. “You don’t sing like that anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s stupid.”
“I dunno. Sometimes it can be kinda fun.”
The Antichrist of Kokomo County Page 25