by Jerry Cole
Just as he’d observed outside, his father was, indeed, an incredibly old man, now. Splayed back on his bed, his cheeks were hollow. His cracked lips were slightly open, showing rotting teeth. His eyelids were closed, almost translucent. Each time he inhaled, or exhaled, Isaac felt insanely frightened he wouldn’t inhale or exhale again. Isaac’s hand stretched across his own chest, trying to follow along with his father’s breath. Somehow, he felt like a puppeteer, trying to orchestrate proper technique.
The room reeked of sickness. It smelled of a nursing home or the particularly aged ward at the hospital. Isaac resisted the urge to cover his mouth, knowing his sisters watched his every step. Beside his father’s bed lay a basin, in which, Isaac imagined, his father pissed. He shuddered, yet tried not to show it. This was his father, at the end of his life. At least, that’s what everyone said.
The hot dogs were finished. Isaac turned to watch Trudy splay several onto various different-sized plates and pass them around. Caroline squashed a bit of ketchup onto the side of her plate, looking pleased with herself. She had to use two hands to do it.
Marcia’s eyes seemed to peer directly into Isaac’s soul. Isaac wasn’t entirely sure what to feel. His heartbeat was akin to a rabbit’s. The emotions he felt were in such stunning contrast to the emotions he’d felt that morning, splayed out beside Wyatt. He felt he’d been on a rollercoaster. He reeled with dizziness.
“Let me sit with him a while,” Marcia offered, stepping forward.
“He’s a bit too weak to sit by his own daddy,” Monica sighed, shaking her head.
“That’s not it,” Isaac blurted.
“No, no, Monica,” Marcia said, with more power than their mother ever had had with her. “It’s a shocking thing, seeing your daddy like this. I remember when my own daddy passed. It’s a process, and we all go through it differently.”
“Isaac’s always been a bit soft,” Monica snorted.
“Monica! I’ve had about enough,” Trudy stammered.
The children dropped their hot dogs into the ketchup and chewed slowly, their eyes enormous, like those of barnyard animals, watching the farmer’s every move.
Marcia stepped between the siblings, marching toward Thomas’ bedroom. With quick motions, she yanked a stool alongside Thomas’ bed and slipped her fingers along his, gazing into his face. She muttered something Isaac couldn’t quite make out. He spun his eyes back toward Monica and Trudy, who both shrugged their shoulders.
“We don’t know,” Trudy mouthed.
“She works at the saloon,” Isaac mouthed back.
“Guess that explains it,” Trudy returned.
But it didn’t, not really. Although Thomas had been far from his Texas home with his children and wife for years, Isaac hadn’t truly allowed him another reality, not in his own mind. What on earth had Thomas Baxter been up to? What did Marcia know about his father’s new “real” life, that his children never could?
Isaac turned to watch Marcia. The light hit her just-so, providing a beautiful slice of orange afternoon glow across her cheek. She looked like a much younger woman, gazing down at his decrepit old man. One of the children, perhaps Zoey, whined about eating the potato salad, demanding someone open the Tupperware for her. This seemed to yank Marcia from her reverie. She stood from the stool, sweeping her fingers across her long-cut shorts.
“Someone has to go back to the saloon to make sure they haven’t burned the place down,” she sighed. “I swear, I try to get Conrad to work the tables during the day, but it’s all a mad show when I get back.” She cleared her throat, speaking directly to Monica. “You’ll call me if he wakes up again? I got me some more things to say to him.”
“Of course,” Monica said, her voice oddly gentle. “I have your cell.”
Marcia sniffed and carried herself out of the ranch house. From where he stood at the kitchen window, Isaac plotted out her course, watching as she marched past the many cult tents, the wide field on which they roamed. A few of the cult members hollered at her, the tone of which Isaac missed fully. She made no response.
“That woman is hard as nails,” Trudy whispered.
“You think she loves Daddy?” Monica asked. She dropped a fork into the hot water on the stove and grabbed a hot dog, tucking it between her teeth. “She sure as hell seems to love him.”
“I don’t know. I never understood how Momma loved him so much,” Trudy said, shrugging. “It’s not as though any of us had a good time of it.”
This seemed to remind Trudy of something. Namely, the elephant in the room. She spun her head, raptor-like, back toward Isaac. Monica cleared her throat. Clearly, in the wake of Marcia’s leaving, it was high time for them to attack him. He waited for the slaps to fall.
“You want to tell us what took you so long, then?” Trudy asked.
Isaac shifted against the counter. “I wish I had a better answer for you.”
“You were scared,” Monica affirmed. “You were always so scared. You hide it, up in the big city, but we know the truth.”
“It’s a bit complicated,” Isaac muttered. His face flashed hot. “I mean, I’m basically—well. I’m the reason he left.”
Monica and Trudy exchanged glances. Trudy rolled her eyes back. They seemed to exchange a wealth of knowledge that Isaac could never possibly comprehend.
“Sure. That’s what he said,” Trudy sighed. “But Isaac, you know Daddy wasn’t happy with us there, anyway. He was looking for anything to get him out the door. He just landed on you first.”
“More we spend time here, the more we think…” Monica began.
“Hush, now,” Trudy piped up. “Look. He’s rustling.”
Isaac spun toward his father. His bony hand glided along his belly, stopping at each of the buttons on his plaid shirt. There was something strange and pathetic about the cowboy hat, which now perched to the side of his pillow, without a head to sit upon. Thomas’ eyes blinked toward the ceiling. At first, Isaac felt they were unseeing, just glossy. But in a moment, Thomas spoke.
“The hell I’m doing back in bed?” Thomas Baxter spouted, with all the ferocity of a man much younger, a man not riddled with sickness.
“Daddy, I told you. You have to stay in bed!” Monica cried. She tapped back into the bedroom, looking a bit tentative.
Thomas shrugged up a bit, bringing his pale face toward her. He yanked himself with the last of his strength back toward the top of the bed, stabbing a fist into the pillow to allow himself to sit up slightly. He gasped just after, showing the amount of strength it all took.
“The hell happened out there?” he demanded. “I tell them cult weirdos to get off my land. They’re leaving now, ain’t they?”
Trudy stepped toward Isaac, leaning a bit toward his ear. Monica spoke to Thomas, her tone child-like.
“Daddy, they’re gonna stick around just a bit longer. But you know these kids these days. They’re gonna head out as soon as their phones die. It’s just the nature of it all.”
Trudy whispered to Isaac, “Honestly, he’s been all perked up since he noticed the people outside. Like it gave him some sort of purpose, wanting to bully them off.”
“That sounds like our daddy,” Isaac offered, with a flippant laugh.
“Who is that in the kitchen?” Thomas boomed, his voice growing in strength.
Monica flashed her head back toward Isaac, making her brown bob shake. Her eyes searched his.
“It’s me, Daddy,” Isaac said, feeling a wave of energy bolt through him. He’d traveled all this goddamn way. And the way his sisters tore through him—seemingly expecting him to fall—made him stand stronger. Perhaps he had more in common with his daddy than he thought.
“Who?” Thomas hollered.
“Your son, Daddy,” Monica sighed.
There was silence. Isaac shifted a bit. His shoes creaked beneath him. He tried to harken back to the sheer bravery he had to exhibit each day in Manhattan, to walk to vibrant, frenetic streets. Out beneath the Texas sun, hones
ty seemed in high demand. There wasn’t a place to hide. He couldn’t even mask himself with a stern expression. This man in the bed, he’d been sitting there the day he’d been born.
“Come on closer, then,” Thomas called.
Isaac hunkered into the bedroom. Monica absently twirled a strand of hair near her ear. Out the window, fires had begun to brew in the center of the fields, seemingly cooking something for the cult’s lunch. The smoke billowed up.
“They best have that under control,” Monica murmured. “Damn idiots. They’re probably in from, what, the Midwest, thinking they can start some sort of fire … Gonna set the whole place ablaze.”
Thomas’ eyes were steady upon Isaac. Isaac slotted himself onto the stool beside his father’s bed, waiting. He felt as though he was under inspection by a doctor, who was preparing to tell him his diagnosis—the effects of which would alter the course of the rest of his life. Isaac supposed this was the generic reason anyone went to see anyone who was on the road to death. They wanted some sort of blessing from the people diving into the abyss. It was the closest anyone got to God, or whatever it all was.
Thomas’ face twitched. Isaac prepared himself for an insult. In the next room, one of the children whined for another hot dog. There was the squawk from the ketchup bottle. It turned Isaac’s stomach.
“I need you to listen to me very, very carefully, Isaac,” Thomas croaked.
This was the first time Isaac had heard his father utter his name in years.
“Okay, Daddy,” Isaac murmured. He sanded his palms together. He felt he would never fall out of this moment. It would surely drip forward to infinity.
“Isaac, you’re my son. You were the only son I ever got,” Thomas began.
Jesus, Isaac thought. This was ominous. The earth felt like it was spinning faster. He prayed for the Venus beings to arrive, already.
“And I need you to do something for me, Isaac,” Thomas continued. “Them bastards out there, they’re all over my land. I don’t know what the hell it is they’re doing out there, but a man has to stand up for what a man owns and has earned in his lifetime. Don’t you think so?”
Isaac was flummoxed.
“What exactly do you want me to do, Daddy?” he asked.
Thomas’ eyelids had begun to droop. He drew his claw-like hand across the bed, latching it to Isaac’s. Isaac couldn’t recall a single time in his life when his father had touched him with such a delicate motion. The touch seemed to echo back all the times he’d smacked him, spurned him with hard-edged words.
His father’s skin was smooth, like hard-worn wood.
“I want you to kick them bastards off. I want you to help me do it,” Thomas murmured. His eyelids drooped lower, casting his eyelashes across his cheeks. “Your sisters, they can’t do it. They don’t have the—the balls you do.”
Isaac frowned. The balls? He coughed, feeling his father’s grip begin to fade. Was this the last moment? Was Thomas Baxter slipping away?
“I’ll help you, Daddy,” Isaac murmured. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Zane always said it about you,” his father whispered, tucking his head deeper into the pillow. “Maybe we had more in common than you realized. What with Zane being, well. It was different back then.”
“What do you mean, Daddy?” Isaac demanded, cutting across the stool. He perched at the edge of the bed, on the verge of gripping his father’s shoulder and shaking him back awake. His eyebrows cinched tight over his nose.
What on earth was his father saying? Was he alluding that Zane had been gay? That, perhaps, Zane had been in love with Thomas? Years of secrets, of things unsaid, sizzled in the air above his now-sleeping father. Isaac’s lips parted. He flung his head back toward Monica and Trudy, his eyes filling with tears.
It seemed Monica and Trudy hadn’t taken the brunt of this emotional conversation. Monica tapped her fists on either side of her waist. Sweat had made the bottom of her bob curl into tight coils.
“You ain’t gonna just go out there and kick the cult out the yard, are you, Isaac?” she finally asked.
“Didn’t you hear what Daddy just said? About Zane?” Isaac offered. He rushed to his feet and tapped back toward the kitchen, feeling in a sort of daze.
Trudy shrugged. “He’s a dying man, Isaac.”
“He doesn’t look that close to death to me,” Isaac returned.
“I tell ya. He’s got some of his color back,” Monica agreed. “It started when we told him Isaac was coming.”
“But it really ramped up when he got all angry about the cult,” Trudy said again. “Daddy doesn’t have time for such nonsense. He ain’t spent a day looking at the stars at all. These people, talking about men and women from Mars? Can you believe it?”
Isaac hadn’t the time to correct them. He suddenly felt an aching exhaustion, which settled in his bones. His shoulders curved forward. He gripped the staircase railing and tapped his foot on the lowest stair.
“Oh, great. Now I suppose you’re gonna go take some sort of nap?” Monica said, leering. “All this time you spent away, and now…”
“Monica. Daddy basically just told me that… that he understands me,” Isaac offered, allowing a single, glowing tear to draw itself down his cheek. “Do you even understand how I’ve... I’ve carried this... this anger for him all these years...”
“Come off it,” Monica stammered. “I told you. He’s senile.”
“He has compassion,” Isaac offered.
“You’re putting it on him,” Monica snapped. “It ain’t him at all.”
“You’re cruel,” Isaac burned back. “You don’t want me to make peace with my father. You just wanted to yank me all the way here so you could rub it in my face that I left—that you pick up all the pieces—that you do all the hard work. And Monica, I know that. Jesus Christ, I do. But frankly, I didn’t have a choice. I grew up a gay kid in a conservative Texas town. Do you even understand what my childhood was like?”
“I had a front seat to your childhood!” Monica cried. “And it wasn’t all flowers and daisies, Isaac, sure. But it’s not as though you went hungry. Momma did her best with you. And you just abandoned us...”
“I don’t have time for this,” Isaac shot back. He ducked up the steps, his heart racing. Within seconds, he slammed himself into one of the bedrooms and hobbled over several plastic toys from the children. One of them cracked beneath his shoe. He cursed, reaching down to grip a little toy horse—dark brown, with a dirty blonde mane that had been falsely swept back, to make it look as though the horse was mid-gallop. One of the legs was now teetering off, something he really didn’t wish to explain. He shot the horse into his pocket and fell back upon the bed, making the mattress quake beneath him.
Below, he could hear his father dip into the once-familiar snores he remembered from his youth.
This was an alert, Isaac supposed. An alert that he was still alive.
Isaac pondered what his father had said again. “It was different back then.”
In his memory of his father, he remembered Thomas Baxter upholding Zane above almost every earthly creature. He’d avoided the terrors of family life; he could shoot better than any man on the range. Isaac remembered an old photo of Zane in his father’s scummy, cigarette-smelling den, wearing a cowboy hat and half-smirking at the camera. Of course, that smirk had been meant for Thomas Baxter himself.
Had his father loved Zane? Had Zane loved his father? And what on earth had been the reason for Marcia’s near outburst downstairs, as she’d slid her fingers along Thomas’ hand, seemingly aching for another time?
When Isaac had marched into the saloon the previous day, he hadn’t imagined such a volatile series of events. He’d wanted only a whiskey drink—a double. Enough to churn him forward on his journey to say goodbye. Now, the world had shifted.
As the time approached three, Isaac, himself, dripped into a strange, amorphous, dream-state. When he rose hours later, his skin felt scuzzy; the air around him
was thick, humid, as though it was preparing to rain. He coughed, unable to remember for a long moment where on the planet he was. He lay fully clothed atop the scratchy bed sheets, listening as the children argued about something downstairs. Monica and Trudy spoke in hushed tones. He could feel the vibrations of their voices through the walls of the shoddily built house.
Seconds later, he erupted from bed. He scrambled forward, bursting down the steps. His head whizzed with a million questions, many of which, he knew, could be answered with the assistance of Marcia.
But before anything, he ached to see Wyatt again. For whatever reason, Wyatt felt like his grounding to reality, his last jolt of sense in a world that seemed to spin increasingly out of orbit. If the men and women from Venus DID arrive soon, he prayed he would be latched around Wyatt’s sleeping form, listening to him breathing. It was the only sound he wished to hear in the world, just before it all ended.
Chapter Eight
Wyatt
After the séance—a bit of a shoddily-crafted one, during which several of the cult members seemed to grow bored and wander back to their RVs for beers and snacks—Marney tried to convince Kenny and Wyatt to work with her on the assembly line, gathering up food and supplies for the next several weeks of “worship” and “preparation.” Her eyes were gooey gumdrops as she asked, seemingly unwilling to accept another answer.
But Wyatt’s fingers were hungry to begin crafting his article. He turned his eyes toward Kenny, who seemed to refuse to look at Marney.
“Actually, Marn, I have a bit more work to do back at the house,” Wyatt said, forcing himself to sound as regretful as he could. “Do you think there will be more work later?”
Marney’s cheeks grew slack. “There’s always work to be done,” she said. “Everett said that if we don’t all add our hands to the mission, then we surely won’t make it.”
“You keep saying that,” Kenny said, his nostrils flared.