The way on a hot summer day the little kiosk was cool and musty with a few products, a bottle of wodka and outdoors the scent of baked vegetation. Then he looks up and the boy is smiling down at him, lissome, his face open and mild, petals of a flower. Holding a mug of tea which Bocar hands to him. “Come, now, I must make the bed.”
It is the boy’s voice. The boy’s voice, and he is back to being a boy. A certain pitch, resonance, high-pitched, slightly nasal, that connects directly with his dick and causes it to tremble. It has nothing to do with anything else; it is all about sound. But how much better this is, why has he never thought of it before, no more women’s vaginas, those hairy holes in which he is supposed to thrash around… in the hot and slippery… how can he not be enjoying this time, he has been wasting it all in his rage and despair that they are coming to get Bocar, but for now at least Bocar is here and the kindness of the child, how can he not love him?
“If I can get coins enough for the pay phone, ever, I’ll call my daughter and tell her we got married,” he says.
The boy is quiet. “She will not mind?” he says after a while.
“Maybe. After all, I got remarried without telling her or inviting her but I can only hope she’ll understand.”
The boy’s question has flattened, slightly, his newly realized joy. He drinks his mug of tea, Bocar has put in milk and sugar, just the way he likes it. He wants to ask Bocar certain questions: if the boy cares for him, if the boy had slipped into bed beside him because he wanted to or because he felt obliged, now that they were married… really, if that is the case, it need never have come to that.
But he keeps his mouth shut. Perhaps he doesn’t really want to know. The boy is quick, neatly making up the beds, folding the blankets on the pallet. A mewing: his favorite cat, the red Persian, proudly drops a dead… mouse? He takes it away from him. It is maybe poisoned or sick, he has no faith in his cat’s hunting skills.
“Thank you,” he says to the cat. “What a day of presents, eh?” He has forgotten that with his back turned away the boy can’t read his lips and he goes over and tenderly begins to massage the boy’s shoulders; the boy leans back into him purring… Things must be okay for him, then.
Just as suddenly it is a new month and the water – and the fish and worms – disappear, now it snows; all records are broken! And the city has run out of money to keep plowing, salting – which is okay, because, just as abruptly, the snow stops and the temperature goes back up. August, mixed with snow, sleet, a tornado… each day has a different climate. It could just as easily be January or July with a hundred and twelve degree weather one day and below freezing the next, or sudden darkness in the middle of the day, or even light all night long.
Though he has managed to collect enough coins to make a call of perhaps thirty seconds, there is never any answer at his former home and finally he tells Bocar he will go home to tell Julie in person they are married. He travels by night, arrives twelve hours later.
His house – his former house – is in ruins.
Where is his daughter? In tears he half squats in the sour burnt stench, only to find something glinting. Kitchen knives, forks, and crooked white bone, a blackened ring with a cabochon stone that has crackled. What. What. What? Surely it can’t be. It’s the ring he gave Julie. It must be her fingers. He holds the carbonized ring, the burnt shriveled finger to his chest, bent over, sitting in that terrible mud of hardened ash. The remains of his driveway, still nicely re-tarred. At that moment from around the corner Cliffort lopes into view, his ridiculous hopping gait. One or two bounds, Cliffort is by his side. “What happened?” he says, looking up, “What happened? Where are they? Where is my Julie?”
“Gone.” That wet-skinned creature is leering, chinless with his big Adam’s apple. “Came back, found the place like this.”
What’s the freak doing, patting him on the back? Trying to comfort him? With a roar Slawa springs up in hot bliss, punching and kicking. This weak clown does not even strike back! Before he knows what he is doing Slawa has his knife in his hand, open blade, and slashes at that scrawny neck, the blade is so sharp he barely touches him. His knife peels an apple, only in reverse, first the creamy pale flesh and then the dart of red. Cliffort’s blood. In horror Slawa flings down the knife, stumbles back across the destruction and flees. Later he will be sorry to have left it behind, the comfortable weight of it, the bone handle, the honed blade.
And when he gets back to the shoe repair shop, keys made, fifteen, twenty hours later, sneaking in through the underground passage, Bocar is no longer there.
“Bocar?” he calls. “Bocar?” But Bocar is gone.
21
It’s another night for Murielle and Julie. The moon is up, with its crooked happy face. It would be a full moon, except there is a big chunk missing, from the era when the moon was used as a site to detonate old nuclear warheads, the idea of some former President who got elected on the Environmental Platform.
Helicopters are flying low over the swamp just as they emerge by the highway. “Mom, I think we’re safe, if we stay under the overpass.”
“Tomorrow, we’ll go back to the swamp to head toward the city, maybe your dad can help us, I think he’s living in the repair shop.”
“Okay, that sounds sensible.”
They unfold their sleeping bags on the gravel. “Do you want something to eat?” Her mother rummages in her pocketbook. “Let me tell you what I brought along: dried apricots, some sour balls, two tuna-fish sandwiches…”
“That’s okay, Ma. I’m not hungry.”
“Well, you should eat something, you’ll sleep better.”
“That’s okay…”
Maybe her mother is right, she should eat something. She lies in her little mummy bag, the dog alongside her, but can’t reach that place, the weird transparent place that comes between wakefulness and sleep; how can she make herself get there? Julie is fairly certain that Sue Ellen – if that is even her name – is accompanying them on the long march. For one thing the bag is clammy all night and in the morning when she gets out it is soaking wet, and it is definitely not her!
Bowel movement. If there is this ghost, why did it have to come with them? She is a practical person, yet inexplicably, while her mother opens two cans of Spicy D-8, Julie finds herself scrawling in the dirt with a stick: CAPITALIST ROADER! COW DEMON! and muttering aloud “Ghost demon! Huli!”
“What are you saying, Julie?” her mother asks.
“I dunno,” says Julie. What the hell is it all supposed to mean, she is sure it didn’t come from her and the only explanation is that Sue Ellen won’t leave them alone.
Poor Sue Ellen. For her it is something similar to being trapped… in an L-shaped ashtray; only there are different staircases that led up to rooms crowded with furniture. The whole thing is a nasty business – there is no way to make any sense out of it. It all seems real enough, just… ugly. And half the time she felt as if she were waiting on line to use a toilet… an endless line to a women’s room with toilets that never flushed or were out of loo paper… or there was no door to the stall, or the stall is so small there was no way to sit on the toilet without crushing her… knees. She knows it isn’t the same as being alive, that somewhere she must have taken a wrong turn but now… What is she supposed to do, she can’t figure out how to get back – or go ahead. And Damnit, they keep calling her by the wrong name! Stupid Landowners, she would never be able to re-educate them!
In the morning they head south, through the sludge and stickers of marsh grass and finally up onto the twenty-lane highway. Here and there people have moved into the abandoned cars, the cars and vans and trucks are bumper to bumper, long out of gas, batteries dead, though fully optioned with reclining leather seats, satellite connections, sunroofs…
The squatters have stitched up curtains, removed the front seats and turned the back into a bed… Around the cars on the tarmac the contents of the trunks have been scattered: extra tires, scrapers, shovels, coo
lers, salt and bags of sand for icy conditions, burnt-out flares, surfboards and tents.
A scrawny bird, furiously jumping up and down, hops into view. Are her eyes that bad? Julie can’t believe it, she has never seen a ground bird before. “That a rooster?” she asks.
“Sick chicken,” one of the men explains. “She having a seizure. Chicken fit.”
The other men crowd around eagerly. “Chicken fit! Chicken fit!” They begin to lay bets on whether or not it will produce an egg.
An egg coming out of a bird? That is so bizarrely unnatural, Julie thinks, hobbling down the hot tarry highway as she inhales peppery acid wind from the burning garbage, carrying Breakfast, whose little paws are burning hot and sore.
Some miles down they come to Great Adventure World. It has been out of business for years since the newer, Better Greater Adventure World had been built. Now before them are fifty acres of roller coasters that no longer work, creaking rustily, a gondola ride that once went up in a tunnel to the top of a mountain with a fake Swiss Village; water slides long since drained of water. The whole place is surrounded by a heavy-duty electric fence, no longer receiving electricity, snipped in places with wire cutters… Someone has hooked up a generator and attached a boom box, from which loud Spanish music – merengue? The rumba? The cha-cha? – blares… The smell of marijuana and hot grease…
Julie is scared. “Ma, I think we better get going.”
“Hey, look! There’s Dyllis!” Her mother lets out a shrill taxi whistle and begins yelling. After a pause she hears the pounding of footsteps through gravel coming up to the fence.
“Oh! Vayo con dios! I can’t believe ju found me!”
Dyllis is accompanied by a little lavender donkey with feathery wings, too small to be useful. Nevertheless, Dyllis had rescued it; she thinks she can make some money by giving little girls rides – that is, if she ever sees any little girls with any money. “My gosh, Dyllis, what are you doing here?” says Murielle.
“I lost my yob! That Jesse March Bishrop, he come in, he says, where the animals? Ju geev me them now. I say, ‘Mister, I don’t know nothing about no missing animals, ju crazy!’ So he fire me. And after I invented, myself, the palm-sized lion! The man make millions from me, this is how I am treated!”
“Oh my gosh!” Julie bursts into tears, “I know it’s my fault! I was the one who took the animals home!”
Dyllis doesn’t respond. Finally she says, “Come on in, ju can meet my frien’. Ju remember Cliffort?”
Julie can’t believe Dyllis is traveling with Cliffort. “Cliffort?”
There is a grunt. A croak. She knew all along he wouldn’t want anything to do with her now that she is almost blind and boiled. But… wait just a minute, he is wrapping his long cool arms around her, and in her ear he erupts with a long, low, “Ribbit!”
“Oh, Cliffort, what’s wrong?”
“Julie, I don’ know how to tell you,” says Dyllis, “I fin’ him left for dead, he got his throat slit. He no die, but now he no can talk and he don’t remember who do this thing to him. And something else. When he perspire, he sweat…”
“Is he sweating green?”
There is a grunt. He is looking into her eyes. Such strange round eyes, almost lidless, or at least so they appear, unblinking. But even though they are nearly expressionless she knows he still loves her. She cautiously reaches out her hand and he takes it in his.
Julie sighs with happiness and closes her eyes. “Chromidrosis: in very rare instances the perspiration may be colored yellow, red, green or blue. In most of the observed cases the eyelids have been affected. The action of micro-organisms is suspected of causing the pigment to be formed.”
“So Julie, what can he do? Ju know, he a proud jung man, a leetle bit vain, he so ashamed alla time to be sweatin’ bright green.”
Julie shakes her head. “Nothing’s coming to me for a cure.”
“So… he gonna be like this forever? The people, they see him, they laughing. They like to embarrass him to make him sweat, or make him hop around, ju know, to see the green come out all ovah hees body.”
“Oh, poor Cliffort.” He nuzzles her tenderly, his skin is so cool and soft; she is happy.
“So, Murielle, eet’s a good thing you got outta your old neighborhood. I went by, a couple of days ago… They bulldozed the whole place, they gonna cover it over. Some kind of contamination, at least, that’s what Rima Patel told me.” Dyllis babbles on as they go through the rusted amusement park… it is almost empty apart from wispy creatures who occasionally flit here and there, children, perhaps, skittering out of the crumbling Haunted House of the Doomed, darting below decks of the Jolly Roger Pirate Ship.
They stay at the park for two nights. The dog keeps talking about sex, muttering, “Let’s fock.”
It always seems to happen just as Julie is dozing off, or is having a nice dream… It drives her nuts, that little weird voice, “Come on, leetle mommy, let’s fock –” She grabs him by the scruff of his neck and says, “Breakfast, you’ve got to cut it out! What’s wrong with you, you never used to be like this.”
“I sorry,” he says. “I sorry. I can’t help. But everthing so… so… so nice, Julie. We in outside, so good for Breakfast! I loff! But Julie…” the little dog whines.
“What is it?”
“Now I hungry…”
“Me too.” But there is nothing to eat and finally they give up and get into the sleeping bags, the little dog snoring softly in Julie’s ear. All night long the strange sounds, wind in the creaky and rusting rides, between the bones of the roller coaster that had once spun screaming passengers upside down. But more than that, a kind of intestinal carping, the splitting of the globe’s… skull?…the mysterious shriek of car wrecks, though the sounds had to be ghost sounds, no cars could get anywhere near here… almost the same groans as a sinking ocean liner or the sea itself drying up with a steamy hiss. But in any event, the sounds go on for so long, eventually they no longer notice. And so they sleep.
The men camping are from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the San Blas Islands, somehow they have made their way here by boat, hoping to find work but had been turned away; now they are in danger of being picked up by the police and conscripted into the military…
Dyllis explains it is almost impossible for them to survive, they have no credit cards, no cash, there is nothing for them to eat… The grilling meats are rats which they manage to catch, and the occasional giant eel-lugworm that was able to live in the polluted marsh-mud.
The men are kind to share the little they have. There is a kind of Northern alligator that can survive even in bitter cold, it was originally designed to feed on sewage and other waste… Once, the men say, they found one almost fifty feet long. They killed it and tried to eat it but it was absolutely inedible, no matter what they did to the meat: the taste of rotten garbage was too profound to cover up. Sometimes they collect snails, which they keep in a box for a few days until their systems are cleaned out. Fried in oil, the snails taste of peanuts. The only difficulty is in having to fry snails that make little squeaky sounds and have such big blue eyes with lashes! “Probably a bio-genetic engineer snail, right?” says Dyllis. “I remember there was another lab, they spliced a cetapod with a legume and something else. Maybe some escaped? At least Bermese Pythion wasn’t the only one.”
A hologramovision crew from the Humanitarian Poverty Channel stops by; at first everyone hides. Finally someone is coaxed out to speak to the camera after being promised voice and face will be disguised; it is to be a human interest story on the men’s plight.
The crew decides to leave behind a half-eaten box of chocolates and some hard candy, hand sanitizer, a can of soda and a half-eaten canister of veggie bacon bits which one of the cameramen likes to have as a snack. “I’m so sorry we didn’t bring any other food with us!” says the blond reporter who did the interview. “And clothing! And old magazines! But I’m sure after this airs, you’ll be getting tons of help!”
“
Help, yeah,” mutters one man. “After eet air, they gonna come and close us down.”
Her mother and Dyllis discuss the reporter with a mixture of envy and loathing: the blond hair with highlights in a perfect hue of ashen gold! The clean gray suit with the monogrammed pink silk shirt and neon-blue codpiece! The petit-point slippers in ecru echidna-skin! “I bet that’s how Tahnee is living these days,” says Murielle.
“If we can ever get in touch with her maybe she’ll take us to live in Nature’s Caul,” says Dyllis. Both sigh dreamily; there are probably only a few hundred people on the planet who are able to live this way, with private jets and hairdressers.
The rest gives Breakfast’s paws a chance to recover. He is so tired that at night he snuggles with Julie and Cliffort in her sleeping bag, murmuring and whimpering in his sleep. “Daddy… where are you?”
Julie also misses Slawa. She is worried about him. She hugs Breakfast and remembers how Slawa had been so gentle to the dog, teaching him how to speak. There had been a couple of times when in some sort of fit of pique Slawa had kicked him across the room. But that had only increased the dog’s love for its master. Why would that be? She asks the dog, but Breakfast is unable to articulate and only mumbles. Eventually the dog’s slow breathing becomes her own and she falls asleep.
In the morning everyone has emptied out of the camp, except for Murielle and Dyllis and Julie; Cliffort is off with the men on a hunting-and-gathering expedition. Even the dog is gone; he has found or begged some rat bones and is happily gnawing some distance away. It is a Perfect Beach Day, the hot wind and the sound of slapping flags or sails, the sky ice-blue and without a cloud. Soon it will be too hot to do anything.
When Julie goes off for a pee, squatting by the side of the muck, she is horrified to find a slushy mass of jelly sloshes out of her, somewhat firm, clear with tiny black dots in it. Is it her period? But she thought that was supposed to be blood. She shoves the pile into the water, covers it over with dead sticks and a rock before she goes back, oddly bereft and homesick.
They Is Us Page 28
