Later, Papa came out and joined him. He was holding a drink with chinking ice cubes. Old Jim was getting heavy traffic tonight. After swigging a few times, he said, “You're growing up, Far."
Farley could tell by his voice that he had already had several quick ones. Keeping that iron grip on himself while Mama insulted him must have cost him a lot.
The remark about growing up made Farley uneasy; it often preceded bad news, as in, “You're growing up, and it's time you started doing some work around here."
Papa said, “I really believe you're taller than I am."
They had to stand back to back to measure, but of course it was obvious. Farley had noticed it long ago. Papa was small-boned and walked with his toes turned in and his shoulders hunched forward. Farley's big-boned, spare body was going to grow up until it was even with his big hands and feet.
"In P.E., Mr. Swayze said I'll be six feet tall by the time I'm fourteen,” he said proudly. “I can beat up any kid in my class."
Without the slightest warning, Papa said, “I expect you take after your father."
Farley held his breath. Then whispered, “Who is he?"
"I don't know. Somebody your mother knew before she met me. I always ... felt like you were my son. You'll understand these things better when you're older."
Tears began to run down Farley's long, pointed nose. Other fluids were clogging it inside.
"Why don't you call me George?” Papa suggested in a strangled voice.
Farley hugged him and called him George, then ran away and hid under a neighbor's azalea bushes. When he came back an hour later, he felt years older.
In the morning he woke to a house that was curiously soundless. Farley padded barefoot into the front bedroom and knew at once that Mama hadn't slept at home. Her scent was old, from yesterday.
She was back when he came in for lunch. With his peeling sunburn and a baseball bat in his hand he looked like a Norman Rockwell magazine cover come to life, except that Norman Rockwell boys all had freckles and snub noses.
Mama was looking nice, wearing a summer linen dress, with her brown hair in a long bob lying on her shoulders. Dior's New Look had come in, so her dress covered her knees; Farley had just begun to notice ladies’ legs, and also that Mama had good ones, slender but not bony, shapely he guessed the word was.
She sat on the sofa in the shadows of the living room with a dreamy expression on her face, and after he leaned the bat against the wall she drew him down beside her and lightly touched his face, careless of getting his sweat on her little white hand.
"Far,” she said, “you're growing up."
His stomach turned over twice. Here it comes again, he thought.
"Honey,” she went on, “did you ever think it was, well, strange that I'm always going shopping and almost never bring anything home?"
As a matter of fact, he didn't. He had a vague idea that ladies shopped the way that kids played. It was just something they did.
"Uhh."
"Well, Honey, you see—a man's been coming to town to visit me. A man I knew a long time ago."
He stared at her, seeing as if for the first time her red raspberry lipstick, her powdered skin, her big starry eyes, and her glossy hair.
"A long, long time ago?” he managed to whisper.
"Yes, Honey. Actually, you'd like him. He looks a lot like you."
Farley exhaled. Now he thought he knew what was coming.
"He's a Cajun,” she went on, smiling. “He's the biggest General Motors dealer in the Teche country. His place is called Evangeline Motors. He's a real successful businessman. He lives in a big brick house by the water...."
Abruptly she rose and walked up and down. The smile vanished; she was twisting her hands.
"He was married when I knew him before, and there wasn't anything we could do about it. I mean, we're both Catholics, and so that was that. Well, I started going with George, and—it's all so complicated. George and I got married and I had you. I've been so mean to him, I just hate myself, and now I'm going to leave him, and you have to try to understand, Honey, even if you don't understand everything. You know George and I haven't been happy together. And it all kind of came to a head, and now—well, this man I told you about, he wants me to go back with him to Opelousas."
"Are we leaving today?” he whispered, trying to picture the man from Cajunland and the stream of water that had turned out to be a Louisiana bayou, not a Martian canal.
"Well, no, Honey,” she said, looking away from him, “we're not."
He stared at her.
"It's not possible,” she said urgently. “Try to understand. Officially, you're George's son. And this man, he has children of his own, and he says they're enough of a handful. Anyway, you love George, and he loves you, and we'll see each other often, I promise you that. I'll be back real, real often. And you can come visit us in Opelousas."
Farley didn't kill her with the baseball bat, even though it seemed to be there just for that purpose. The idea did not even occur to him. Afterward, he wondered why not.
* * * *
Next day Mama left, in floods of tears, with a man who picked her up in a shiny black Lincoln Continental. Farley hid in the azalea bushes and spied on him; the man had a long nose and wore a white Panama hat, and his big dark hands rested on the plastic wheel with its silver horn ring as he waited for her to join him.
She had ordered Olivia to send her clothes, so she just got in and they drove away together, to Cajunland. Or to Mars, what difference did it make?
The heat didn't break. The city had been thirty-two days without rain and every day the newspapers reported the deaths of people, animals, and trees as front-page news. The papers made it sound like the end of the world because, while places like Arizona might go for three years without rain, in New Orleans it rained all the time and a month of drought in summertime seemed unendurable.
Since Farley's world had in fact ended, the unnatural seemed natural to him. George tried to comfort him, but that was impossible, because he was only the sitter. Farley wanted his mother, and even though he hated the Cajun from Mars worse than anyone he'd ever known, worse than God who had let this happen, he wanted him, too—the father he had seen once, sitting behind the wheel of the great big Lincoln.
Tommy came and called outside the house, but Farley ignored him and after a while he went away. Farley went alone to the canal and sat in the tunnel and wept. Night after night he could not sleep, even when he drank three or four shots from the new bottle of Beam that George had brought home.
Through the long darknesses his anger grew. Mama wasn't the only one who had rages, though his were silent and therefore worse. Cissy barked and barked, and a little after four o'clock on the fourth morning after Mama left, he decided it was time to feed her to Garmusk.
He got up, made a brief stop in the light of the refrigerator, and went outside. The moon was setting and it was low to the west. An ivy-covered fence, a sweet olive, and a tall myrtle tree cast impenetrable shadows. The yard belonged to another planet, with only the incessant insect chorus and Cissy's barking to speak of Earth.
Farley slid through the shadows over the bristly dry grass, listening to the bugs grow silent and then start up again behind him. He knelt by the fence and held out a bit of cold cooked meat. Cissy came over to investigate, half growling, trying a tentative wag of her tail.
Farley had always had strong hands; he got them from the man from Mars. The chickenwire was a problem, but the hexagonal meshes were wide and his long, strong fingers got hold of Cissy's throat and pulled her against the wire. The sudden scuffle, the gurgling gasp, and the final quiver came and went unheard.
Farley slipped into the neighbors’ yard for the body and carried it by the tail to the washroom where Olivia labored during the day. He found a pillowcase in the soiled-clothes basket and put Cissy in.
Hunched over like a troll carrying a sack of ore, he left the yard, his rubber Keds silent on the ground. Ceramic e
lves stared blindly and reflecting globes caught him for an instant in their glimmering orbs. He tried to move in the deep shade of trees and hedges, uneasy at the humpbacked shadow the moon showed him. When he reached the canal the sloping walls lay stark and white as bone. With the marsh so close, millions of insects and frogs chanted deafeningly.
Then in the water, V-shaped wavelets stippled by the moonlight pointed the path of something big swimming just beneath the surface. The ripples ceased; the swimmer knew that Farley was there. He bent and let Cissy's body slip with a soft rustle and splash from the pillowcase into the canal.
For a long moment nothing happened. Then the water surged and something burst upward, scattering spray. Big jaws streamed black and silver and Cissy's dark body was momentarily visible, even her sharp little snout. Something swallowed, gulp, gulp, and sank back into the water.
"Garmusk, was that good?” Farley asked, and a voice that was not his own answered, Very good.
Farley sank down, legs shaking. It was like a voice in a dream, yet he wasn't dreaming. One thing he was sure of: it was not a voice he'd ever heard before. It was hoarse and grating and brought with it a long train of echoes as if it spoke from the bottom of a well.
He waited until the lopsided moon set, and in the profound darkness that followed, a thick body heaved itself out of the water, claws scrabbling on the concrete.
Farley almost wept with disappointment. It was only a gator after all—a big one but, after all, just a dumb old lizard that had found a refuge in the tunnel and came out at night to hunt.
The gator raised itself on bent legs and swayed to the mouth of the drain and disappeared very slowly. The gleaming tip of its armored tail was last to go, leaving a long wet mark on the concrete.
"There wasn't no voice,” he told himself bitterly. “It was just a ‘lucination. I must be going nuts."
Then, deep and hollow, it said Come again.
He heard his own whisper. “Are you Garmusk?"
Sometimes.
"What planet you come from?"
I come from Far.
"That's not a planet. That's my name."
I come from Very Far.
The echoes died away. Farley shouted, but only the bugs and frogs answered. In a daze he set out for home.
* * * *
Back in his bed he fell asleep and his rest was deep; Olivia tried to get him up at eight, but he went back to sleep, and at nine, but he slept until ten-oh-five, and woke then only because he was ravenously hungry.
Olivia made him pancakes and smiled to see him gobble them down. He ate like Garmusk, gulping whole mouthfuls at a time.
He was noisy and lively that day. It was Sunday, and George took him for a drive along the beachfront in his old Plymouth and bought him a big shrimp sandwich and a snowball covered with sticky sweet green syrup, and Farley feasted on everything.
That night he heard George say to somebody on the phone, “He's had a rough time, but he's getting over it."
Farley smiled at that. Yet something had changed, or why was he smiling?
Next day he went swimming alone and swam farther out in the lake than he ever had before, as if he were half gator himself. Back home he slammed into the house, thinking of nothing except that he wanted lunch, and there was Mama, waiting for him. The Cajun from Mars had kicked her out.
Farley stared at her, sitting on the couch looking sad, wringing her little hands in a gesture like his own, then raising her face with the shit-eatingest smile he'd ever seen.
Saying, “I'm back, Honey.” Then weeping. “I'm so sorry I ever went away. Can you forgive me?"
He said, “Sure, Mama.” She hugged and kissed him, and he hugged her back, crying and longing to kiss her, to kill her.
There was a song from the laundry room that day as Olivia celebrated the return of things to near normal. That night George slept on the couch, as if Mama had an exclusive right to their bed whenever she chose to occupy it.
The neighbors were less forgiving; everybody knew the story, having received it from their maids who had it from Olivia. That Sunday, on the way to church, Farley saw neighbor ladies cross the street to avoid meeting Mama. The priest talked grimly about the Seventh Commandment, never mentioning what it was, but every eye was on Mama and she snuck out at Go, the Mass is ended without waiting for the finale when the choir, all in different keys, burst into Day of Wrath.
Farley returned home with various ideas that had come to him during Mass. He called Tommy on the phone for the first time in days. But Tommy said that he couldn't associate with Farley for a while. His mother had put her foot down; she said that Farley was not to blame, but....
But what? Tommy asked. But nothing, his mother said.
All day Farley slid around the house in the brown shadows, listening. He was trying to get straight exactly what had happened in Cajun country. It wasn't easy, because Mama and Papa didn't talk much and when they did, they tended to skip over the good parts. Yet by nightfall he had gathered a small trove of information.
Apparently the man from Mars had hundreds of relatives in Opelousas. His wife had died less than six months before and the relations were all outraged when he picked up somebody else's wife and brought her home with him. He had fifteen kids of all ages, none of whom would have anything to do with Mama. When Mama said she was going to divorce Papa, that only made it worse, because everybody knew that divorce was out for Catholics.
The local priest had preached on the unbreakability of marriage vows in both English and French, to make sure the whole congregation understood what he was saying. So after a week, the man from Mars told Mama it wasn't working, he had a business to keep going and perhaps she had better go home. And here she was, not because she wanted to be but because she wasn't welcome where she'd gone and had no place else to go.
Next day Farley brought a flashlight to the tunnel and walked in deeper than ever before. The circle of light bounced crazily off the walls. Echoes accompanied him. The water with its smell of rotten eggs came trickling out of narrow pipes and deep beds of algae that had formed during wet weather lay brown and tangled, waiting for rain. Spiders had spun webs, mosquitoes whined, and wigglers twitched in the remaining pools.
A long way in, Farley smelled something especially bad and played the dancing light across a pile of stinking dung with undigested hair in it. He moved on, and when the tiny star at Elysian Fields had grown to the size of a big shining planet, he reached a catchbasin holding a broad pool of black water.
In the pool something moved, sending ripples against the toes of his Keds. One green eye fleetingly picked up the light, then two.
"It's me,” said Farley.
I know.
"Are you inside the gator, Garmusk?"
For the time being.
"Can I go back to Very Far with you? I don't want to go home."
Then step into the pool.
Farley stared, thinking about an article in one of George's encyclopedias. About how an alligator killed: how it seized an arm or a leg, beat the water with its tail until its whole body was revolving, twisted off the limb and swallowed it. When the victim died of pain and shock and blood loss, it left the body to decay and grow soft, then ate the rest a chunk at a time.
Did he have to go through all that to join Garmusk?
He hesitated, touched the pool with one foot and drew it back again. Thinking of the violent death that lay so close made his breath grow short and quick. For a while his whole body vibrated in a tremolo of yearning and repulsion.
Finally, sweating and shaking, he mumbled, “I'm ascared to."
Tell me what you really want.
"I want to die but I'm ascared to."
Then do what I do.
"What do you do, Garmusk?"
When I want to die, I kill instead.
Farley backed up slowly, then turned and walked quickly away. His feet squished in the spongy growths of the tunnel and his own pumping blood sang in his ears.
; * * * *
He didn't get much sleep that night, though Cissy was gone and his sunburn had healed and the fan kept him cool. In the morning he phoned Tommy, hanging up twice when an adult answered. The third time he got him.
"Far, I ain't supposed—"
"That's okay, I won't tell. Tommy, I seen the gator. He's laying out sleeping in the tunnel where you can see him."
"No shit?"
"Nuh uh. You want to go and see him now, before he moves?"
"Uhhhhh...."
"I'll meet you there in ten minutes. Just don't tell anybody where you're going. They'll get pissed off if you do. They know who you always go there with."
"Ohhhh ... kay."
Tommy too was breathing fast: for him, the little drip, disobeying his mother was practically a mortal sin. But also a big thrill.
Far visited the washroom, where Olivia was sitting in an old split-bottom rocker, resting. He told her how happy he was that Mama was back, and that made her smile. He left the washroom with a piece of clothesline in his pocket.
Kneading his big, strong hands together, he set out. When he arrived at the tunnel, he found Tommy waiting for him just inside. Far had thought about bringing a club, but had correctly decided he wouldn't need it. He'd always been strong for his age, very strong.
And it was interesting—later, when the men were searching for Tommy while his parents stood by and watched. Far hadn't been sure he could deceive adults, and at first he felt nervous as the men were walking into the tunnel and calling Tommy's name.
They looked so strange. Why hadn't he ever noticed before how strange Earth people were? They had hair on one side of their heads but not the other. Their hands had only one thumb each. Wouldn't two thumbs opposing three fingers give a firmer grip?
In the tunnel the men were starting echoes as they questioned and answered one another. Far found he could switch them off and on, sometimes hearing words and sometimes only noises like the growling of dogs. Some of the men went all the way to the pool, but Garmusk made the gator stay down out of sight, and after a while they came back out and started to question Far again.
FSF, May 2008 Page 13
