by Alden Bell
SUBDIVISIONS. THOSE magnificent bone-white homes duplicated row after row on grids that seem to grow like crystal with the sharpness and precision of God’s artisanship, with softly sloping sidewalks and square patches of overgrown lawn and garage doors like gleaming toothy grins. She likes them, the way the homes fit together like interlocking blocks. When she hears the word community, this is the image that comes to mind: families nested in equally spaced cubes and united by a common color of stucco. If she was living in a different time, she would like to live here, where everything is the same for everybody, even the mailboxes.
Here among these pretty homes, on a four-lane road with a wide grassy island in the middle where banyan trees are planted at equal intervals, she finds an accumulation of meatskins, a trail of maybe twenty, all loping awkwardly in the same direction. She pulls the car up past them to the front of the line where there is a large man trying to outpace the congregation behind. In his arms is the body of an ancient woman no larger than a child.
She slows the car beside him and rolls down the window.
Hey mister, she says, you’re collectin quite a crowd. You’re gonna be in a bind if you get tired of walking before they do.
The man looks at her with flat gray eyes, empty of comprehension, and keeps walking.
Come on now, she says, that’s one grim parade you got behind you. Whyn’t you and your grandma come around to the other side and get in the car. The least I can do is get you a head start if you like derbyin so much.
The man looks at her again. He is big, with unwashed hay-colored hair that hangs in strings and a dishpan face with slow, heavy-lidded eyes that seem too small for the breadth of his flat cheekbones. There is something on his forehead that looks like soot, and he breathes through his mouth, his lower lip jutting out. He begins to trip and stumble over his own feet, and she gets the impression he has been walking for a long time already. The old woman in his arms is dead, but it doesn’t look like she’s been dead for long.
You’re a dummy, ain’t you? A little slow in the head like? Well all right, dummy, we’ll do it your way.
She pulls the car on up ahead and shuts it off, then reaches into the duffel bag for the AR-15 scoped rifle and slaps a cartridge into it and gets out of the car.
The man keeps walking past her, and she gets down on one knee and leans against the side of the car to steady herself and then starts firing. The sound isn’t a crack like some of the older rifles she’s used. This one is military issue, and it gives a muffled pop with each shot like the crank of an engine.
The first two she hits in the head with one shot, which she can tell by the spray of blood and bone and the way they drop already motionless and dead before they hit the ground.
The third, a woman in a nightdress, she hits in the shoulder, which spins her around, and it takes two more shots to get her in the back of the head.
The next shot hits the neck of an obese slug, and he puts his hands up, birdlike, to stop the flow of blood. Then she hits him in the forehead.
She fires until the clip is empty and then reaches into the car for her gurkha knife to finish off the rest and make sure they stay down. Then she rises up out of the slop and fans herself with her panama hat and feels the breeze on her face and breathes in the pure air sweeping down through the palm trees lining the street.
By the car the man has set the ancient woman delicately down on the sidewalk. He crouches beside her, gazing at Temple with a look of abject irresolution.
I shoulda let you die, dummy, she says. What you thinkin pulling a train of slugs behind you like that? You ain’t destined to survive this world. Most likely I just went against God’s plan for you, fool that I am.
He looks up at her and back toward the carnage behind her.
Do you talk? she asks. Or are you the kind of dummy that don’t say anything?
He reaches down to the corpse of the old woman and uses his knuckles to move her hair out of her face. A low moan escapes his mouth, inarticulate, like a mewling baby.
How long your granny been dead? Not too long I guess. But you best leave her go before she starts creepin around again. Cause when she does, she ain’t gonna be thinking about feedin you soup no more.
She goes to the car and opens the door and gets in. The day is bright and the road ahead is wide open and the breeze is cool and feels nice on her skin and her hand is feeling fine. But she knows she’s not going to get that picture out of her head—the picture of that man kneeling by his dead granny and fixing her hair for her. So she climbs back out of the car.
Doggone it, she says. Come on, dummy, let’s put your grams in the ground.
In a nearby garage, she finds a shovel and two small fence pickets and a ball of string and she loads them into the man’s arms and leads him out into one of the small garden plots where the soil is loose. Then she hands him the shovel.
Go ahead, dummy, start digging. She ain’t none of my grandma.
She points and the man digs. He stands a full two heads taller than she, and his shoulders slope downward as though it is difficult to bear the dense, lumbering weight of his body. She has to show him how to use the shovel, how to hold it—but when he drives it into the earth it sinks deep and true. Meanwhile, she takes the two fence pickets and puts them crosswise and uses the string to tie them together tight.
Now you gotta put her in it, she says when the hole is deep enough. She points to the ancient bony body and then to the hole.
He lifts her and gently sets her down on the raw clayey earth and then looks to Temple for further instruction.
Okay, um, now you gotta get some flowers. A whole bunch.
She picks a tiny wildflower from beneath her feet.
Like this, but bigger. There’s a bunch round the front of the house. That way. Go on.
He goes, and she takes the pistol she brought from the car and gets down into the grave. She examines the woman closely, touching her fingers and her wrists. Then she pulls up the eyelids and sees the eyes. They are rolled back in the head, but they are already beginning to rotate ever so slightly.
Temple tries to pry open the mouth, but the teeth are clenched shut. She puts her fingers under the old woman’s nose.
Get a whiff of this, granny, she says. Come on, now, open up.
The old woman’s head tilts slightly upward and her jaw opens to try to get her teeth around Temple’s fingers. Temple puts the barrel of the pistol in the mouth and points it upward and fires. Then she quickly pulls some handfuls of loose dirt into the grave and puts them under the old woman’s head to hide the mess and climbs out of the hole.
When the man lopes around the corner from the back of the house looking frightened, she shows him the gun and points to a nearby tree.
Ain’t nothin to worry about, she says. I was just takin a potshot at a squirrel. It got away. You got them flowers?
He has a handful of them, pale and broken-stemmed with roots and gobs of dirt hanging from them.
They’ll do, she says. Now come on and fill in this hole.
He does it, and she watches his slow movements, which seem to her like tectonic movements of the earth, glacial and resounding, full of pith and mineral.
She takes the picket cross and hammers it into the soil at the head of the grave.
That’s so God knows where to look when he comes to find her, she explains. Now go ahead and put those flowers on there. Go on now.
He puts the flowers down and looks to her.
All right then, dummy, I guess you got a better chance of staying ahead of them slugs now that you’re unburdened of granny. God only knows what you was made for, but I reckon you gonna find your place among saints and sinners.
Halfway back to the car she realizes he’s following her, those weak cloudy eyes looking down at her legs, following the shadow she casts on the pavement.
What you doin, dummy? You can’t come with me. I ain’t the one to take care of you. I ain’t a kind and gentle creature. You understand
me? Look here, you got the wrong girl. I’ll feed you to them meatskins just as soon as look at you. I don’t need no halfwit to have to worry about.
She looks at the car and then back at the man.
Doggone it, dummy. You got a fate same as I do, same as everybody. Your livin and dyin ain’t on me. It can’t be. You stay there now and stop following me.
She puts her hands up to indicate he should stay, and she backs slowly to the car. She gets in and shuts the door and looks one last time at him, standing there in the middle of the street like a tree stump.
Then she drives away, gripping the wheel tight—and the thick throb of pain comes back into her hand, and she grabs on to it and doesn’t let it go because it feels like an earned suffering.
OVER THE next rise, there’s a convenience store and a gas station. The pumps are still working, and she fills her tank and then gets some food. She finds some cheese crackers and takes them outside and sits on the curb to eat them while in the distance some slugs wander to and fro oblivious of her.
She remembers Uncle Jackson, when he first found her and the boy Malcolm holed up in a storm drain, living off squirrels and berries.
Where’d you come from, little bit? he said.
There she was, not yet ten years old probably, snarling at him, baring her teeth like a beast of the earth.
Feral, huh? he said. I’m not convinced. I see the glimmer, girl. You’ve got smarts whether you like it or not. My cabin’s that way, about a half a mile. Come by when you’re tired of the drainpipe.
He showed her how to shoot, how to hold your breath when you are aiming at a distance—and he showed her how to drive a car and how to start one without a key. He fed her and Malcolm oatmeal in ceramic bowls.
He said, How long have you been taking care of that boy?
Awhile.
Are you his sister?
She shrugged.
We was raised in the same place, she said. Everything got mixed up. Nobody was sure.
He nodded.
Come here, he said. I have something for you. It’s a khukuri.
What’s that?
He shuffled around in a chest in the corner of the room and brought out something wrapped in a blanket. It was a blade that bent inward and shone red in the firelight. It was beautiful, and she wanted to touch it. She thought it would feel cold, that it would make her fingers feel vibrant.
It’s Nepalese, he said. There were warriors in Nepal called gurkhas. Very strong, very fierce. Resilient and self-sufficient. Like you. They carried blades like this.
What you call it? Cuckoo?
Khukuri. But if you can’t remember that, you can just call it a gurkha knife.
She remembers, later, Malcolm, just a couple years younger than she, asleep on a mound of blankets in the corner, Uncle Jackson’s snoring from the other side of the room, the light from the remaining embers of the fire casting a pale glow through the cabin—and her turning the blade over and over in her hands, her eyes closed, feeling the weight of it and the balance, getting to know it, putting it against the skin of her face and her lips.
It was a gift. It was the first gift anybody had given her since she could remember.
In the parking lot of the convenience store, she gets to her feet and returns to the car and sits in the driver’s seat for a while, thinking about a lot of gone things.
Finally she starts the car and swings the wheel around and drives back to the subdivision.
He’s still standing where she told him to stay, pulling on the ends of his greasy hair and squinting in the sun.
She pulls up next to him and rolls down the window.
How long were you gonna stay there, dummy? she asked. What was your plan exactly, just wait until the slugs gave you a reason to move? I never seen such a fool as you—and I seen some foolishness without compare in my life.
His sad thick eyes look into the car. She tries to follow the gaze, but what he’s really looking at is inside his own head. He has a skillet face and a frame like vegetal growth and sluggish eyes and a mind with no doors or windows.
She reaches over and opens the passenger door and then tosses the duffel bag into the backseat.
Well come on if you’re comin, she says. But I ain’t promising you’re gonna live.
HE KEEPS tugging at his hair and scratching, and pretty soon she figures it out.
You got head critters, dummy.
In the next town, where the water lines are still pumping, she finds a house with a spigot in the side yard and a hose attached.
Bare yourself, dummy, she says. He doesn’t understand, so she has to show him by unbuttoning two of his shirt buttons. His eyes watch her fingers intently. Go on, she says, don’t be shy. You got no luggage I ain’t seen before.
He strips himself down and stands in the middle of the overgrown yard and shuts his eyes tight and holds on to the rag she gives him while she sprays him front and back with the hose.
Now wash, she says, miming the action for him. He moves the rag around on his body, trying to mirror the gestures she makes. Harder, she says. That soot ain’t just gonna brush off.
Finally she gets impatient and takes the rag from him and scrubs his back and his front above the waist and his arms.
Now you gotta take care of yourself down there, she says, pointing to his crotch. This girl ain’t full service.
He circles the rag lightly over his genitals a few times.
Close enough, she says. We find a place to stow you, and someone else can teach you about personal hygienics.
A few blocks away, in a commercial strip, she finds a hair salon and bashes in the window and takes him in the back where the sink is and shows him how to wash his hair. For a long time he just sits in the chair with his neck leaning on a sink with a semicircular cutout, letting the water wash over his scalp.
It can’t hurt him to have a good long soak, so she spends the time washing her own hair and combing it out and using the scissors to trim off the ragged ends.
When he’s done in the sink, she puts him in one of the swirling chairs before a mirror and takes the electric clippers and cuts his hair down to the scalp. Then she shaves his face and finds some good-smelling cream to slather all over.
Look at you now, Dapper Dan. Now you won’t befoul our ride.
Across the street she spies a tall office building, higher than anything else in the area. They cross and find a way in and take the elevator as high as it will go. Then they walk through the empty corridors until she finds what she’s looking for: fire stairs leading to the roof.
She climbs atop a large metal air-conditioning unit, and he sits next to her. Then she takes out her small spyglass and scans the horizon all around. The sun is low in the sky and the clouds are deep orange and look burnt at the edges.
Let’s take in the view for a little bit. What do you say, dummy?
She looks at him, a big man with a physical density to him, a thickness of body and shape. His eyes look like they are peering out of deep wells in the earth. The skin of his face is worn and leathery.
How old are you anyway, dummy?
He looks out at the sun descending behind the clouds.
I’m guessin you’re a solid thirty-five. That means you were around before all this slug mess started happening.
He puts his hand to his newly shaven face.
I wonder if you remember it. Does that gone past still haunt up your dummy skull? Do you remember the first time you saw a meatskin? Did you recognize it as somethin different, or does everything walkin on two feet look the same to you?
She looks at his eyes, and they seem to be staring at nothing.
You know something? I knew another dummy once before. It was in the orphanage home where I grew up. He was my age, though, and he wasn’t a nonspeaking dummy like you. He could talk, but not very good. And he was runty—born to be slug food, if you ask me. Not like you, you’re like a bear or somethin. Downright fortitudinous is what you are. Anyway, Malcol
m and I, we liked to take him around with us. Malcolm especially—he was always trying to teach him things, like how to blow bubbles in his soda with a straw.
She looks down at her hands, the pink polish on the nails, the stump of her left pinky finger wrapped up in gauze. It aches, and the aching seems like a symbol of something.
Anyway, she says, I don’t wanna be talkin to you about Malcolm. Forget I mentioned it in the first place. What we gotta do, we gotta find a safe place to unload you. Cause followin me around everywhere is a sure way to get yourself eat up. That’s our mission, dummy, to find you a new home.
She looks through the telescope onto the horizon. In the distance she can see a black car approaching on the same road she came into town on herself.
See now, she says, I knew I was feelin something not right. You gotta trust your gut to guide you true, that’s lesson number one.
She looks through the telescope again and the car dips behind a foothill.
See, it’s possible that that’s just anyone—but you know what my gut tells me? My gut tells me that’s my old friend Moses Todd who’s got some business he’s gonna want to finish up with me. It’s a wonder how he’s trackin me, but you can’t put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It’s like a dang vocation with them.
She collapses the miniature telescope and puts it back in her pocket and takes one last look at the sunset, which is really and truly a thing to behold.
SHE TAKES the road north out of town and drives fast for an hour, dodging slugs wandering in the middle of the road. She hums tunes, and the big man hunched in the seat next to her seems to like it. He does not smile, she does not know if he can smile, but his eyes take on the look of a child lulled near to sleep.
The next city she comes to is a big one, growing up like something organic. Thick with overgrowth, it has reverted to wilderness and old times under the shadowed canopy of spindly oaks. The trees grow beards of Spanish moss that hang nearly to the ground and float their ancient white tails in the breeze. Spreading out from the main avenues like twigs from branches, the broken asphalt roads give way to brick lanes, brittle barbecue shacks with torn screen doors and collapsing roofs tucked into alleyways behind big white colonials hidden behind gates of thick ivy, which, in turn, are secreted behind the commercial districts of block stores and low-stacked parking garages. In the middle of town is a square that must have been the site of some final showdown. There’s a huge marble fountain, long dry, filled with eviscerated corpses gone to bone and black. In the middle of the fountain is a marble statue of an angel, her wingtips pointing still unbroken toward the sky, and a dead man hangs slung around her neck as though he would ride with her to heaven except that his lower half below his waist is gone, which makes him look like an absurd hand puppet tossed profanely over something holy.