Marvel and a Wonder

by Joe Meno

  He mouthed the words along to the music, the sentences themselves feeling hesitant and small. Then something flew at him from the corner of his eye. In a moment he felt a clod of dirt hit him on the side of the face. He glanced over his shoulder at a shabby-looking A-frame house, the spot where the dirt had been launched. There were two small boys, shirtless, wearing rubber Halloween masks. One was a Devil, the other a Dracula. The Devil had a second handful of dirt at his side; Dracula was holding a pair of nunchakus in a threatening manner. They were maybe eight or nine years old, both of them wearing blue jean cutoff shorts, their skinny white chests bare.

  “Hey, O.J.,” the one in the Dracula mask called out.

  The one in the Devil mask hit him on the shoulder with the patch of earth but Quentin only shook his head.

  “O.J.!” the boy wearing the Dracula mask shouted, his red mouth armed with gigantic white fangs. “What you doing here, O.J.?”

  “My name’s not O.J.,” the boy finally said.

  “But you’re black. You’re a nigger.”

  “I’m not a nigger. I’m not black.”

  “What? You’re not black?”

  Quentin looked away for a moment, a red splotch of embarrassment spreading across his shiny face. “I’m not black.”

  “What are you then?”

  “I’m Italian.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it,” Quentin said.

  “The police gonna get you,” the boy with the Dracula mask declared, leaning against the white fence. “I’m gonna tell them you’re black, and then they gonna get you.”

  “I don’t give a shit.” And then borrowing a line from Biggie, “I kill cops for target practice.”

  Both young boys looked at him, stunned.

  Quentin started walking again and then paused when he saw the boys’ mother step out quietly onto the front porch. “Randal, who was that?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. Quentin did not turn back to glare at her, only shuffled on like an outlaw in his own mind, the steady thump of the bass and drums marking his unstoppable forward momentum.

  * * *

  Gilby stole inside the adult bookstore, Private Pleasures, the glass door banging behind him, a faint buzz ringing out, the sound of which had once been something like a bell but was now a sort of electronic gasp. Leg Show. Barely Legal. Creamers. On Golden Blond. Dirty Lancing. Jurassic Pork. ET, the Extra Testicle, the box covers and magazines all agonizingly slick, glowing in a Plasticine haze. Freddy Saps was behind the counter, a giant of a man with large bifocal glasses. He was sipping from a Big Gulp and watching the Detroit Tigers on a small black-and-white television set. He nodded silently at Gilby, taking a long draw from the bendable red straw.

  “My brother been in here?”

  Freddy nodded again, arching his eyebrows and tilting his head in the direction of one of the private booths. Gilby glanced over, feeling a little conspicuous, a nettle of red bumps rising along his neck. Whistling, he approached the two doors at the rear of the store, marked with the gold-plated numbers 1 and 2. He peeked over his shoulder once more, scratching at his itchy neck, and then, with some hesitation, knocked on the first door. There was no answer. He knocked again, heard what seemed to be a handful of quarters fall to the floor, the sound of a pair of pants being jerked up, a belt buckle being tightened, followed by two quick steps before the door swung open. His brother’s face was splotchy and red, the way it looked when he was embarrassed or mad about something. It looked like his nose was running too.

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “I got something.”

  “You got something, huh? You got a dick in yer ass is what you got.”

  “No, I got something, man.”

  “I oughta blacken your other eye.”

  “Go ahead then.”

  The older brother sniffed, his nostrils flaring large for a moment, as he inspected the bruise he had made on his younger brother’s face. The sound of a porno flick still running on the close-circuit television echoed in the background. Some person unleashed a low, deep-throated moan, the kind someone undergoing a major operation without the luxury of anesthetic might let out.

  “You’re a runt is what you are,” the older brother decided, sniffing again.

  “What I got to say is important.”

  “I bet.”

  Gilby glanced around once more. “It’s money.”

  “What money?”

  “Money.”

  “What kind of money?”

  “A couple thousand. Maybe ten. Got to be.”

  The older brother squinted, his nostrils still flaring, glanced up at the front counter, at the empty aisles and glossy covers, and seeing that they were alone, he led his brother into the private booth. Originally, the booth must have been a bathroom, as there was the mounting for a sink and the remnants of cut pipes. A small color television was bolted to the wall, in front of a rough-looking vinyl chair. In the corner was a garbage bin, a box of tissues sitting above it on a narrow shelf. There was his brother’s jacket and a pair of black gloves lying beside the chair. What his brother was doing with black leather gloves Gilby did not know. He took everything in, and just then noticed that the flick his brother had been watching featured an enormous black man with a preposterously large dick. He had on a white cowboy hat and was, with his penis, aiming at a target of some kind.

  “What are you watching?” Gilby asked, amused, but his older brother was not having it.

  “Mind your own business. Now what the fuck do you want?”

  “I was in the bar down the street—Mr. Peel came in and sent me home early.”

  “Make your point or leave me to my considerations.”

  “I’m getting to it.” Gilby glanced up and saw two women tied to a tree, naked. The cowboy, outfitted with a holster and chaps, found them and immediately began to take charge of their happiness. “So I went to the Bide-A-While because it was early and there was nobody but the old-timers inside. I was playing that poker game and then I overheard Gordon behind the bar talking to this guy, this old one, and they start chatting about this old fella’s horse, how it’s a racer, but the old guy ain’t got the time to run it. Someone he didn’t even know gave him the horse, and it’s a racehorse just sitting out there all by itself, and there’s nobody out there but the old guy and his grandson, this half-nigger kid that comes into the store all the time, and I don’t know, all of a sudden, I thought of you, I guess.”

  “Yeah, what about me?”

  “How it might interest you and all.”

  “How the fuck would you know what interests me?”

  “I don’t. I just was . . . I was just . . .”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking is all.”

  “Thinking, huh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Say what’s on your mind.”

  “I was just thinking . . . we could take it. I heard they got a fancy trailer out there. All you’d need to do was lead it to the trailer, hook it up to your truck, and drive off.”

  “What the fuck do you know about it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All you know about that kind of thing is what I told you or what you seen on TV.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  “Really.”

  “I’ve done all kinds of stuff.”

  “You’re soft, Gilby. You run when you get scared. You’re candy.”

  “You don’t know about me.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I know you don’t open your eyes when you fight. I know you ain’t hard enough to go through something like stealing a horse without crying to Mom.”

  “Fine. Forget it. And fuck you.”

  “Fuck you too, candy-ass.”

  “You’re the candy-ass.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You fuck men.”

  “Say that again so I can stab you.”

  The
older brother reached over and got his hand on his younger brother’s throat. Gilby gagged and sputtered.

  “You ain’t nothing but a child in this world,” the older brother said. “You’re all talk. You say you’re gonna cook meth for me. You’re a hot-air balloon, Gilby. That’s how you always been.”

  “I don’t care what you say,” Gilby muttered. “I heard you crying the other night. You ain’t as hard as you act.”

  “What you heard was the prayers of a lost soul coming to grips with the failure of the American dream.”

  “What?”

  “If you ever cracked a book you’d know what the fuck I was talking about.”

  “You think just ’cause they made you get a GED, you’re some kind of professor. I don’t think you know half of them words you throw around.”

  “That’s the plague of ignorance you’re describing.”

  “I’m leaving,” the little brother announced. “You got too weird. California made you somebody else.”

  The older brother’s face went soft then. There was something in his eyes, an unsteadiness in the pupils, that showed just how frightened he really was. “I think you’re right. I think maybe I got bit by something out there.”

  The younger brother smiled uncertainly, the grin hiding behind his unshaven face.

  “What kind of horse is it?” the older brother asked, turning serious.

  “I don’t know. Some kind of racehorse. Thoroughbred or something.”

  “And there ain’t no one on that farm but the boy and the old man?”

  “No. They out there all alone, off Route 20. They might as well be on the moon.”

  “You know the way out to their place?”

  “Yep. I been out by there a couple times. It’s on the way to the lake.”

  “Okay, little brother,” the older brother said, smiling. “Show me.”

  * * *

  Jim stood on the corner, feeling as if he were at sea. Now he was tipsy. He found the boy waiting near a pair of train tracks that hadn’t seen a working locomotive in six or seven years; his grandson had his headphones on and was nodding along to the music, the boy’s shadow lengthening before him in the afternoon’s dim light. The town’s buildings stretched away from the sun in brief shadows, dividing the street into several parallelograms of lusty darkness.

  When they climbed into the cab of the pickup, the grandfather wondered if he ought to ask the boy to drive home but he was feeling a little steadier, so he inserted the key on the red plastic Indiana-shaped key chain into the ignition without trouble. He started it up and listened to the eight cylinders hum. The fact that the pistons’ capacity was judged in horsepower—horse power—made him smile. He thought he ought to tell his grandson this, and other things—like how at that very moment he’d decided that the white mare would one day be the boy’s, not just part of a meager inheritance to be divided equally with his often-absent mother, but the boy’s alone, as there was nothing else—not the land nor even the chickens themselves—that would provide much in the way of a future life worth living. He wanted to tell the boy how the horse would have to do, as it was the only thing of value the old man had to offer, and how the two of them standing there, watching the animal run in the morning or at night, was the closest he had been in a long time to not feeling like a failure. Because he was certain the boy’s mother would try to sell the place as soon as he was in the ground, and spend whatever paltry sum she was able to get for the land and equipment on the useless entanglements of her various maladies, which would be only the latest in her lifelong adventure of mistakes, and he wanted the boy to keep the horse if he could; and if he couldn’t, then it would be all right to sell it too, if that was what the boy wanted, though again, the grandfather hoped the boy would not. He hoped the boy would hang on to the horse for as long as he could.

  All these things flashed through Jim’s mind as he listened to the blue pickup driving through the approaching dark. He even opened his mouth to tell the boy some of these plans, his lower jaw unclamping itself to reveal the still-startling white teeth, but then, thinking on it a little longer, he chose to let the fading colors of dusk—pearl-blue and pink and red—fill the empty cabin air with their own kind of conversation.

  * * *

  The sign along the right side of the road exclaims: Phantom Fireworks. Shelton Fireworks, Home of the $3 Artillery Shell. Pilot Fireworks. USA Fireworks. Holiday Fireworks. Mr. Fireworks. Wild Bill’s Fireworks. Patriotic Fireworks. Fireworks City. Boomtown Fireworks. Woodpecker’s Mulch & Landscaping & Fireworks. Indy Fireworks. Uncle Sam’s Fireworks. American Fireworks. Dizzy Dean’s Fireworks. Victory Fireworks. Sky King Fireworks. Dirt Cheap Fireworks. TNT Fireworks. Fireworks Depot. PYRO VALU Fireworks. Fat City Fireworks, the flat white billboard bedecked with a red firecracker, an exclamation point, a cartoon explosion.

  * * *

  By the time they arrived back home, it was dark. He parked the pickup at an angle and climbed out. The grandfather and the boy did not go inside the darkened farmhouse. Instead, they led the horse out of the lean-to and tied it to the snake-rail fence. There they combed it and brushed the small brown burrs from its white legs. Quietly the grandfather set a hand upon its gray muzzle, staring at it. It was sort of like gazing up at the sky, or down a well, or arriving at church before anyone else had got there; you could not help but contemplate the steady, profound beauty of this animal, standing only a few feet away on the other side of the fence, to consider its flawlessness and shape.

  Once it had been curried, they turned it loose, watching the horse’s long legs and smooth, rounded hindquarters spring and return, spring and return, in a staggering kind of symmetry, appearing utterly mechanical. The grandfather grinned, watching it go. The boy smiled in return, then glanced back as the horse drove past again.

  After a half hour, after the sun had fully departed, they led the mare back inside its stall, replaced the bolt-through slot, and drifted toward the house. They ate their TV dinners at the kitchen table, occupied by their own thoughts, lapsing into a silence that lasted the duration of the evening.

  * * *

  Inside the red pickup that Saturday night, the two brothers drove west toward the highway. Then they slowly braked and turned down the long rural drive, the dust rising high, clearly visible even at this time of night, one a.m. About half a mile farther, they switched the headlamps off, the two brothers silent within the darkness of the cab. The truck began to slow along the fence line, and pulled to a stop along a culvert. One body climbed out, then the other, one slow and shiftless, the other rife with agitation. Someone had a pair of binoculars. They passed them, one to the other then back again, and listened. There, right beside the dilapidated metallic chicken coop, was the silver trailer. The tumbledown stable. The squared-off pasture. The two shapes stood there for a moment longer, staring, no words being spoken. One body followed the other back into the cab. The truck pulled around, driving off, its headlights snapping awake. The night air contained clouds of mayflies even though it was nearly September.

  _________________

  At dawn the horse was quiet within its stable, the morning light streaming through its mismatched slats. For a moment the animal looked golden, its mouth nuzzling the open palm of the grandfather’s hand. A sugar cube disappeared from his wet fingers. “Hello, old girl,” he said, leading her out. He filled up the water trough and raked out the manure, then petted its muzzle, feeling the animal’s breath against his warm palm. Then he led the animal over to the paddock and watched it make abstract patterns beneath an advancing sun.

  By seven a.m., Jim had made a second pot of coffee and considered the work they had to get done—clearing the western field, counting and candling the eggs, feeding the birds. He walked across the kitchen and poured himself another cup. The boy had now woken up and was standing in the doorway, in a black T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, looking troubled.

  The boy hung his head low and announced, “I require thirty dollars.�
� The words hung in the air like a cloud of gnats, buzzing with a certain irritation all about Jim’s ears.

  “Thirty dollars? What for?” the grandfather asked, but there was only a stony silence as the boy apparently did not care to answer. This morning he had on a black T-shirt that said Slayer, with skulls and knives and other ridiculous illustrations on the front—chains and sobbing angels and pentagrams—drawings that would probably qualify as satanic, though Jim was confident that his grandson lacked both the know-how and temerity to participate in witchcraft.

  “I require thirty dollars,” the boy said again, still not looking Jim in the eye.

  “Is that a fact?” the grandfather muttered. He took another sip from the chipped coffee mug and turned to face the uninterrupted light coming in through the kitchen windows. The fields outside were flush with a magnificent glow.

  The boy groaned then, ruining his grandfather’s enjoyment of the moment; Jim shook his head and turned back to face the boy still standing there in the doorway. “Son, I want you to answer a question for me before I answer yours. What is my name?”

  “Sir?”

  “What is my name, son?”

  “Jim.”

  “First and last.”

  “Jim Falls.”

  “Jim Falls. That’s right. Not Jim Rockefeller, not Jim Woolworth, not Jim Ford, or any other. So what does that mean to you?”

  “You’re not gonna loan me the money.”

  “No sir. What kind of fool would I be to loan you money without even knowing what it’s for? I’d be a sorry case, just like you, without a cent to my name. And I don’t care to have that in common with you. Now, unless you want to tell me what it’s for . . .”

  “I don’t want to have to tell you what it’s for.”

  “Well, of course, I can appreciate that. You’re a man with your own needs. What I suggest is you head over to the bank in town. You remember you got a checking account we started a few years ago? Go in there and ask them if maybe they might be interested in giving you a loan for something you don’t want to talk about. I got a sneaking suspicion that Bob Blair or one of his clerks is gonna ask you the same thing I just did. And if that idea don’t suit you, well, you can do what I’ve always had to do. Which is to go out and get a job and earn a dollar and spend it any way you see fit.”