Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  Josh showered and soaped the sweat off. Tomorrow night he was due to wrestle in Garden City, Kansas, which would be a long, dusty trek across the state. And a hot trip, too, because the air conditioner in his car had broken down a few days earlier, and he couldn’t afford to get it fixed. His next paycheck would come at the end of the week, in Kansas City, where he was to participate in a seven-man free-for-all. He got out of the shower, dried off and dressed. As he was putting his gear away the match’s promoter came in to tell him that Johnny Lee Richwine had been taken to the hospital and that he’d be okay, but that Josh should be careful leaving the gym because the hometown folks could get a little rough. Josh thanked the man in his quiet voice, zipped up his traveling bag and said goodnight.

  His beat-up, six-year-old gray Pontiac was parked in the lot of a twenty-four-hour Food Giant supermarket. He knew from the experience of many slashed tires not to park any nearer the wrestling arena. While he was so close to the market, Josh went inside and emerged a few minutes later with a package of glazed doughnuts, some Oreo cookies and a jug of milk. He drove away, heading south on Highway 81 to the Rest Well Motel.

  His room faced the highway, and the rumble of passing trucks sounded like beasts prowling the darkness. He turned on the “Tonight” show, then took off his shirt and smeared Ben Gay on his aching shoulders. It had been a long time since he’d worked out in a gym, though he kept telling himself he was going to start jogging again. His gut was as soft as marshmallow; he knew he could really get hurt there if his opponents didn’t pull the kicks and punches. But he decided to worry about that tomorrow—there was always tomorrow—and he put on his bright red pajamas and lay back in bed to consume his snack and watch the tube.

  He was halfway through the doughnuts when an NBC News bulletin interrupted the celebrity chatter. A grim-looking newsman came on, with the White House in the background, and he began talking about a “high-priority meeting” the president had just had with the secretary of defense, the Armed Forces chief of staff, the vice-president and other advisors, and that sources confirmed the meeting involved both SAC and NORAD. American air bases, the reporter said with urgency in his voice, might be going to a higher level of readiness. More bulletins would break in as the news was available.

  “Don’t blow up the world till Sunday,” Josh said through a mouthful of doughnut. “I’ve got to collect my paycheck first.”

  Every night the newscasts were filled with the facts or rumor of war. Josh watched the broadcasts and read the newspapers whenever he could, and he understood that nations were jealous and paranoid and downright crazy, but he couldn’t fathom why sane leaders didn’t just pick up their telephones and talk to each other. What was so tough about talking?

  Josh was beginning to believe the whole thing was like professional wrestling: the superpowers put on their masks and stomped around, roaring threats and swinging wildly at each other, but it was a game of macho, strutting bluff. He couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after the nuclear bombs fell, but he knew it’d be pretty damned hard to find a box of glazed doughnuts in the ashes, and he surely would miss them.

  He had started on the Oreos when he looked at the telephone next to the bed and thought of Rose and the boys. His wife had divorced him after he’d left pro football and become a wrestler, and she had custody of their two sons. She still lived in Mobile; Josh visited them whenever the circuit took him down that way. Rose had a good job as a legal secretary, and the last time Josh had seen her, she’d told him she was engaged to be married to a black attorney at the end of August. Josh missed his sons very much, and sometimes in the arena crowds he glimpsed the faces of boys who reminded him of them, but the faces were always yelling and jeering at him. It didn’t pay, he knew, to think too much about people you loved; there was no point in driving the hurt too deep. He wished Rose well; sometimes he longed to call her, but he feared a man would answer.

  Well, he thought as he opened another cookie to get at the creamy stuff, I wasn’t cut out to be a family man, anyhow. No, sir! I like my freedom too much, and by God, that’s just what I’ve got!

  He was tired. His body ached, and tomorrow would be a long day. Maybe he’d call the hospital before he left, find out about Johnny Lee Richwine. The boy would be smarter for what he’d learned tonight.

  Josh left the set on because he liked the sound of human voices, and he slowly fell asleep with the package of Oreos balanced on the mound of his stomach. Big day tomorrow, he thought as he drifted off. Gotta be mean and strong again. Then he slept, snoring softly, his dreams filled with the noise of a crowd shouting for his head.

  The devotional came on. A minister talked about beating swords into plowshares. Then the “Star Spangled Banner” played over scenes of majestic snow-capped mountains, wide, waving fields of wheat and corn, running streams, verdant forests and mighty cities; it ended with an image of the American flag, stretched out and immobile on a pole sunk into the surface of the moon.

  The picture froze, lingered for a few seconds, and then static filled the screen as the local station signed off.

  4

  11:48 P.M. Central Daylight Time

  NEAR WICHITA, KANSAS

  THEY WERE FIGHTING AGAIN.

  The little girl squeezed her eyes shut and put the pillow over her head, but the voices came through anyway, muffled and distorted, almost inhuman.

  “I’m sick and tired of shit, woman! Get off my back!”

  “What am I supposed to do? Just smile when you go out drinkin’ and gamblin’ away money I earn? That money was supposed to go for the rent on this damned trailer and buy us some groceries, and by God you went out and threw it away, just threw it—”

  “Get off my fuckin’ back, I said! Look at you! You look like a worn-out old whore! I’m sick to death of you hangin’ around here givin’ me shit all the time!”

  “Maybe I oughta do somethin’ about that, huh? Maybe I oughta just pack and get my ass out of here!”

  “Go on, then! Get out and take that spooky kid with you!”

  “I will! Don’t you think I won’t!”

  The argument went back and forth, their voices getting louder and meaner. The little girl had to come up for air, but she kept her eyes tightly closed and filled her mind with her garden, just outside the window of her cramped bedroom. People came from all over the trailer court to see her garden and to comment on how well the flowers were growing. Mrs. Yeager, from next door, said the violets were beautiful, but she’d never known them to bloom so late and in such hot weather. The daffodils, snapdragons and bluebells were growing strong, too, but for a while the little girl had heard them dying. She’d watered them and kneaded the soil with her fingers, and she’d sat amid her garden in the morning sunlight and watched over her flowers with eyes as blue as robin’s eggs, and finally the death sounds went away. Now the garden was a healthy blaze of color, and even most of the grass around the trailer was a rich, dark green. Mrs. Yeager’s grass was brown, though she hosed it down almost every day; but the little girl had heard it die a long time ago, though she didn’t want to make Mrs. Yeager sad by saying so. Maybe it would come back when the rain fell.

  A profusion of potted plants filled the bedroom, sitting on cinder block shelves and crowded around the bed. The room held the heady aroma of life, and even a small cactus in a red ceramic pot had sprouted a white flower. The little girl liked to think of her garden and her plants when Tommy and her mother were fighting; she could see the garden in her mind, could visualize all the colors and the petals and feel the earth between her fingers, and those things helped take her away from the voices.

  “Don’t you touch me!” her mother shouted. “You bastard, don’t you dare hit me again!”

  “I’ll knock you on your ass if I want to!” There was the sound of a struggle, more cursing, followed by the noise of a slap. The little girl flinched, tears wetting her closed blond eyelashes.

  Stop fighting! she thought frantically. Please plea
se please stop fighting!

  “Get away from me!” Something hit the wall and shattered. The child put her hands over her ears and lay rigidly in bed, about to scream.

  There was a light.

  A soft light, blinking against her eyelids.

  She opened her eyes and sat up.

  And there on the window screen across the room was a pulsing mass of light, a pale yellow glow like a thousand tiny birthday candles. The light shifted, like the swirls of an incandescent painting, and as the child stared at it, entranced, the noise of the fighting got quieter and far away. The light reflected in her wide eyes, moved over her heart-shaped face and danced in her shoulder-length blond hair. The entire room was illuminated by the glow of the light-creature that clung to the window screen.

  Fireflies, she realized. Hundreds of fireflies clinging to the screen. She had seen them on the window before, but never so many and never all blinking at the same time. They pulsed like stars trying to burn their way through the screen, and as she stared at them she no longer heard the awful voices of her mother and “Uncle” Tommy. The blinking fireflies commanded all her attention, their patterns of light mesmerizing her.

  The language of light changed, took on a different, faster rhythm. The little girl remembered a hall of mirrors at the state fair, and how the lights had reflected dazzlingly off the polished glass; now she felt as if she were standing at the center of a thousand lamps, and as the rhythm became faster and faster they seemed to whirl around her with dizzying speed.

  They’re talking, she thought. Talking in their own language. Talking about something very, very important...

  “Swan! Honey, wake up!”

  ... talking about something about to happen ...

  “Can’t you hear me?”

  ... something bad about to happen ... real soon ...

  “SWAN!”

  Someone was shaking her. For a few seconds she was lost in the hall of mirrors and blinded by the flashing lights. Then she remembered where she was, and she saw the fireflies leaving the window screen, rising up into the night.

  “Goddamn bugs all over the winda,” she heard Tommy say.

  Swan pulled her gaze away from them with an effort that strained her neck. Her mother stood over her, and in the light from the open door Swan could see the purple swelling around her mother’s right eye. The woman was thin and haggard, with tangled blond hair showing dark brown roots; she glanced back and forth between her daughter’s face and the last of the insects flying off the screen. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “She’s spooky,” Tommy said, his thick-shouldered body blocking the doorway. He was stocky and unkempt, with a scraggly brown beard covering his angular jaw, his face thick-jowled and fleshy. He wore a red cap, a T-shirt and overalls. “She’s fucked up in the head,” he said, and he swigged from a bottle of Miller High Life.

  “Mama?” The child was still dazed, the lights blinking behind her eyes.

  “Honey, I want you to get up and put your clothes on. We’re leavin’ this damned dump right now, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Tommy sneered. “Where you gonna go?”

  “As far away as we can get! I was stupid to move in here with you in the first place! Get up now, honey. Put your clothes on. We want to be out of here as soon as we can.”

  “You gonna go back to Rick Dawson? Yeah, you go on! He kicked you out once before, and I picked you up! Go on and let him kick you again!”

  She turned toward him and said coldly, “Get out of my way or, so help me God, I’ll kill you.”

  Tommy’s eyes were hooded and dangerous. He drank from the bottle again, licked his lips and then laughed. “Sure!” He stepped back and made an exaggerated sweeping gesture with his arm. “Come on through! You think you’re a goddamned queen, come on through!” She looked at her child with a glance that urged her to hurry and walked past him out of the bedroom.

  Swan got out of bed and, clad in her nine-year-old-girl-sized Wichita State University nightshirt, hurried to the window and peered outside. The lights of Mrs. Yeager’s trailer next door were on, and Swan figured the noise had probably awakened her. Swan looked upward and stared open-mouthed with awe.

  The sky was filled with waves of moving, blinking stars. Wheels of light rolled across the darkness over the trailer court, and streaks of yellow fire zigzagged upward into the haze that obscured the moon. Thousands upon thousands of fireflies were passing overhead like galaxies in motion, their signals forming chains of light that stretched from west to east as far as Swan could see. From somewhere in rhe trailer park a dog began to howl; the noise was picked up by a second dog, then a third, then from other dogs in the subdivision across Highway 15. More lights were going on in the trailers, and people were stepping outside to see what was happening.

  “God A’mighty, what a racket!” Tommy was still standing in the doorway. He bellowed, “Shut the fuck up!” and then finished the rest of his beer with one angry gulp. He fixed Swan with a baleful, bleary-eyed gaze. “I’ll be glad to get rid of you, kid. Look at this damned room, all these plants and shit! Christ! This is a trailer, not a greenhouse!” He kicked over a pot of geraniums, and Swan flinched. But she stood her ground, her chin uplifted, and waited for him to leave. “Wanna know about your mama, kid?” he asked her slyly. “Wanna know about that bar where she dances on tables and lets men touch her titties?”

  “Shut up, you bastard!” the woman shouted, and Tommy spun around in time to stop her swing against his forearm. He shoved her away. “Yeah, come on, Darleen! Show that kid what you’re made of! Tell her about the men you’ve been through, and—oh, yeah, tell her all about her daddy! Tell her you were so high on LSD and PCP and God knows what else that you don’t even remember the fucker’s name!”

  Darleen Prescott’s face was contorted with anger; years ago she’d been a pretty woman, with strong cheekbones and dark blue eyes that communicated a sexual challenge to any number of men, but now her face was tired and sagging, and deep lines cut across her forehead and around her mouth. She was only thirty-two, but looked at least five years older; she was squeezed into tight blue jeans and wore a yellow cowgirl blouse with spangles on the shoulders. She turned away from Tommy and went into the trailer’s “master bedroom,” her lizard-skin cowgirl boots clumping on the floor.

  “Hey,” Tommy said, giggling. “Don’t run off mad!”

  Swan began to take her clothes out of the dresser drawers, but her mother returned with a suitcase, already full of gaudy outfits and boots, and shoveled as much of Swan’s clothes into it as would fit. “We’re goin’ right now!” she told her daughter. “Come on.”

  Swan paused, looking around at the roomful of flowers and plants. No! she thought. I can’t leave all my flowers! And my garden! Who’ll water my garden?

  Darleen leaned down on the suitcase, pressed it shut and snapped it. Then she grasped Swan’s hand and turned to go. Swan had time only to grab her Cookie Monster doll before she was pulled out of the room in her mother’s wake.

  Tommy followed behind them, a fresh beer in hand. “Yeah, you go on! You’ll be back by tomorrow night, Darleen! You just wait and see!”

  “I’ll wait,” she replied, and she pushed through the screen door. Outside, in the steamy night, the howling of dogs floated from all directions. Banners of light streamed across the sky. Darleen glanced up at them but didn’t hesitate in her long stride toward the bright red Camaro parked at the curb behind Tommy’s souped-up Chevy pickup truck. Darleen threw the suitcase in the back seat and slid under the wheel as Swan, still in her nightshirt, got in the passenger side. “Bastard,” Darleen breathed as she fumbled with her keys. “I’ll show his ass.”

  “Hey, lookit me!” Tommy yelled, and Swan looked. She was horrified to see that he was dancing in her garden, the sharp toes of his boots kicking up clumps of dirt, the heels mashing her flowers dead. She clasped her hands to her ears, because she heard their hurti
ng sounds rising up like the strings of a steel guitar being plucked. Tommy grinned and capered, took off his cap and threw it into the air. A white-hot anger flared within Swan, and she wished Uncle Tommy dead for hurting her garden—but then the flash of anger passed, leaving her feeling sick to her stomach. She saw him clearly for what he was: a fat, balding fool, his only possessions in the world a broken-down trailer and a pickup truck. This was where he would grow old and die without letting anyone love him—because he was afraid, just like her mother was, of getting too close. She saw all that and understood it in a second, and she knew that his pleasure at destroying her garden would end with him, as usual, on his knees in the bathroom over the toilet, and when he was through being sick he would sleep alone and wake up alone. But she could always grow another garden—and she would, in the next place they went to, wherever that was going to be.

  She said, “Uncle Tommy?”

  He stopped dancing, his mouth leering at her and a curse on his lip.

  “I forgive you,” Swan said softly, and the man stared at her as if she’d struck him across the face.

  But Darleen Prescott shouted, “Fuck you!” at him, and the Camaro’s engine fired like the roar of a cannon. Darleen jammed her foot down on the accelerator, laying rubber for thirty feet before the tires caught and rocketed them out of the Highway 15 Trailer Park forever.

  “Where are we going?” Swan asked, cuddling Cookie Monster after the noise of the shrieking tires had faded.

  “Well, I figure we’ll find us a motel to spend the night in. Then I’ll go by the bar in the mornin’ and try to get some money from Frankie.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’ll give me fifty bucks. Maybe.”

  “Are you going back to Uncle Tommy?”

  “No,” Darleen said firmly. “I’m through with him. He’s the meanest man I’ve ever known, and by Christ I can’t understand what I ever saw in him!”

  Swan recalled that she’d said the same thing about both “Uncle” Rick and “Uncle” Alex. She paused thoughtfully, trying to decide whether to ask the question or not, and then she drew a deep breath and said, “Is it true, Mama? What Tommy said about you not knowing who my daddy really was?”