Unstoppable Moses

by Author Tyler James Smith

  He didn’t growl anything or threaten me. There were no warnings. He just looked at me with his sad, hurt eyes before clearing his throat and spitting a wad of red out away from us. He pushed me back down, using the momentum to stand up.

  As he walked away, I said, “Good choice,” under my breath. The entire pack of Pall Malls was spread out on the path. Inside, just down the walkway and past the big doors and down the hall, the campers were hearing about Lump.

  I sat up on my elbows and let my head clear. When the world slowed down, I reached over and picked one of the loose Pall Malls off the ground and stuck it in between my lips, staring down its barrel. I lay back.

  Right as I plucked the cigarette out of my mouth and flicked it, unlit, into the woods Michael crashed out of the door and back down the path. I could hear him storming up to me for fifty yards before he said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” He kicked a tidal wave of gravel at me. “It’s not about you, asshole. We’re your friends.”

  I wanted to tell him that that’s exactly why it was about me because forgiving others is a skill, but forgiving yourself is an art. Especially when no one knows you need forgiving.

  “Mike: that kid got fucked up because of me, okay? She was my responsibility.” I said it as plainly as I could because I still felt like it was true.

  “Get over yourself,” he said. “Bad things happen, you fucking douchebag. That’s it. You’re not the only one bad things happen to, or is Lump not enough goddamn proof of that?”

  I dug a piece of gravel out of the back of my head. I lay back and closed my eyes, picturing him going back to his friends covered in blood. Going back to Matty with a blood-spattered face. When I opened my eyes he was gone. I didn’t know how much time I had before my phone buzzed in my pocket with a call from the taxi company, but it wouldn’t be long. I also didn’t know how much time I had before her parents arrived.

  * * *

  Harriet Tubman was asleep in the warm barn. She was cuddled up on top of the other deer and she had a series of bright green Band-Aids holding a thick swath of bandage to her leg. She was alive. She was safe. Her world was, at least for the immediate time being, apocalypse-proof.

  * * *

  I was sitting on the steps in front of the rec center waiting with my bags and thinking about what Test had said. About how her parents had already been through enough and how they didn’t need me stepping in front of their unfolding disaster.

  The ceramic Buddy was covered in water-logged, melting snow that covered his sign to the point where it was unreadable.

  If I’d still been hallucinating, I would have seen Charlie on one side of me and Lump on the other. I was between living ghosts.

  I imagined them fighting over me and I could almost hear them but I was too awake or too tired to make out what they were saying. So I imagined it: I imagined Charlie telling her that she was being a child on account of her being a child and Lump telling him that she was eight and three quarters and that the way to save the world isn’t to make it hurt more, plus he wasn’t even a real ghost because he was still technically alive. To which Charlie obviously rolled his eyes and muttered about her being a fucking hypocrite.

  If I laughed at Imaginary Lump and Imaginary Charlie calling each other fake ghosts, I knew I’d break apart, so instead I just smile-frowned and let my eyes get hot and wet.

  I imagined Charlie leaning over and saying something about how this kid could fuck right off, since what did she know? I wanted to look over at Lump and see what she thought but I couldn’t because she wasn’t there because she was wrecked in an ambulance, about to start her new and different life. Instead, I kept my head rested on my arms and imagined her not saying much of anything to Charlie which was somehow even worse than hearing her side of the imaginary argument.

  It was like she was getting further and further away. Like the imaginary Lump wanted to yell something at me but couldn’t. Like she wanted to tell me to just get in the taxi and leave.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  I looked to my left to see if Charlie was there but he wasn’t either because he was in a hospital bed a million miles away with tubes running out of his all-but-dead body.

  I kept my eyes on the tree line because there were no ghosts and no judges and no Test to tell me what to do. All I had to do was deal with whatever car came first: if the taxi came, get in, drive away, let them suffer in peace because maybe it wasn’t all my fault and we’re all entitled to grieve and hurt how we each need to; if her parents showed up first, open my arms, look them in the eye, and say I did it—that it was my fault and I was their daughter’s friend, and let them focus all of their pain into one perfect, defined focal point. While they were searching for some kind of meaning in all the broken pieces, I’d tell them to get a blood sample from me because I’d been drinking—that, even if it didn’t show up, there were plenty of witnesses who could attest to the fact that I had been drunk off my ass. To look at my texts that I’d missed. To look at my criminal record. And they’d listen to it all.

  I just had to listen to Charlie one last time. Be selfish, one last time, and make up for how wrong things went at the bowling alley.

  It was just a matter of waiting because the ghosts were gone. It was just me and my luggage.

  I pulled my phone out and brought up my contacts.

  I cleared my throat.

  And I hit Call.

  Three rings later, my mother said, “Hey, Super Boy!” and I felt my face and nose tingling and my throat catching and the hot pressure in my chest and when I didn’t say anything back fast enough she said, “Moses? Are you okay, what’s going on?”

  “Mom?” I didn’t try to keep my voice even.

  “Yeah, sweetie, I’m here.”

  “Mom, I’m really not okay right now and I just need to talk to you and Dad.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, the door behind me opened. I didn’t look back to see who it was but as soon as I saw the bare knees sit next to me, I knew. Test sat down. I knew he’d be gone soon so I told my parents I’d call them back when I knew we could talk for as long as we needed to.

  “Taxi called. They’re pulling around the bend now. You ready?”

  “Don’t really have a choice.”

  “Sure you do. Just have to make it and live with it.”

  “Where are her parents?”

  “Close.”

  I heard it before I saw it. Whichever car it was, it was louder than the late night Midwest wilderness. Test didn’t know which one it was either, because he looked like he was figuring out whether or not I needed to be restrained.

  The lamplight glinted off the cab’s windshield. Nathan the groundskeeper was keeping his schedule because the dirty little streetlights around the camp’s driveways were already on and humming. Test stood up and brushed his hands off on his shorts.

  He waved to the big, clunky cab and walked over to it as it pulled up. He spoke to the driver for a second while I got my bags together.

  Before I piled in, Test nodded at me—not like a dealmaker but like someone who, for some reason, had decided to give a shit about me. I set my duffel bag on the seat next to me. The cab was a minivan with a King’s Ride decal on the side and the driver was a forty-something woman drinking a Big Gulp that smelled like Mountain Dew. She was poking around on the GPS, getting it back to the home screen. She leaned over and breathed deep through her nose.

  “You smell like a campfire; I love that smell.” The smell was in my jacket and in my hair. It was woven through every inch of me. When I die, I will smell like campfires and northern pines and winter come early. “Got any requests, hon?”35

  “Requests?” I asked.

  She held the old-school iPod up. “Makes the ride better for everyone, I think,” she said, and winked at me. “So?”

  I thought about it for a second, looked at her, and said, “How much classic rock do you have on there?”

  Her face lit up and
she moved her shoulders back and forth, mom-dancing in the driver’s seat. “Honey, I’ve got it all. Creedence to Zeppelin, the Stones to Motown.”

  I started to imagine asking Charlie which song we should listen to, but it was Lump I saw sitting next to me. Lump, who was proud of me for getting into the cab instead of talking to her parents. Even if she hated me. Even if she never wanted to see me again.

  “Skynyrd?”

  “Got Skynyrd.”

  “‘Tuesday’s Gone.’”

  And Lump smiled.

  “You got it.” As she shuffled through the iPod, she asked, “So what’s the plan?”36

  I gave her the police station’s address and she hit play on her iPod.

  We started moving, crunching over the snow and the rocks, warm in the music, and as we made our way up the drive I saw them.

  The dinged-up 2007 Honda Odyssey puttering down the driveway was the most terrifying thing I’d have ever hoped to see. It was the fire crawling toward the prison-cell powder keg. It was the sixth desperate pull of the trigger. The eyes under the bed that remind you that there are monsters worth fighting.

  Along the driveway, Charlie stood looking at me; he was thin, and he was wearing his hospital gown, and one of his eyes was cold and dead, and he pointed at them.

  We pulled to the side of the narrow driveway to let them pass. When they parked, I saw the stickers on the back windshield: a father stick figure holding a briefcase, a mother stick figure in a dress, and, next to the dog sticker, a little girl sticker.

  The man who climbed from the driver’s seat, at over six feet, couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and thirty pounds. Her father’s hair was so thin that the light cut clean through it and gave him ghost hair, just like she’d said. He moved like there was cancer in his bones despite it being in his organs and his eyes were swollen, but he stood with cartoonishly good posture.

  Every move Lump’s mom made was brisk and urgent—every adjustment to her hair and shirt, every shuffling of her purse—like every second she was jolting awake and finding herself staring over the edge of her own endless abyss.

  We started moving again.

  Everything started moving again.

  “Goodbye, Charlie,” I said, under my breath.

  She put the van in gear as we pulled up to the stop sign at the front of the drive. The CB radio fixed to her dashboard beeped, loud, but she didn’t seem to hear it because she was looking back at me.

  I watched Lump’s parents disappear safely into the building. They’d have somewhere to put their hate, and if that somewhere was me, that would be okay. They could hate me because Lump was alive, and her name was Allison, and the world would come to know it. I could live with that.

  Under the camp’s welcome sign, just outside of the van, the muddy, graffiti-covered light above the camp’s entrance flickered out.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks, Mom, for the endless love and patience (even when I was nine and drove the car across the bank’s parking lot while you ran inside, especially since I was definitely still young enough to get kidnapped). You’re a saint, and always have been.

  Thanks, Dad, for all the character building (car window, car battery…) but never being afraid to kiss us goodnight or tell us “I love you.”

  Thank you, Jess, for always being the big brother I need, and never being anything less than my biggest advocate in every aspect.

  Thank you, Karen Olson, for being my first reader, my best friend, and my excitement translator.

  Thanks, Seb, for being my other first reader and for putting eyes on “Charlie” (as well as everything else) from its earliest stages. Drinks are on me, bud.

  Thanks for being as weird as me, Eric—I would have ended up being a boring asshole if it weren’t for you. I’m glad we didn’t blow up the neighborhood after digging up that gas pipe in my backyard when we were kids.

  Thanks, Emilia, for sitting across from me at a steakhouse in Michigan forever ago and telling me that this was something I could actually do. To say nothing of taking my author photos and putting up with me since high school.

  Thanks, Jillian, for knowing I was a writer before I did.

  Thanks, Paul, for the deer and for being a creative sounding board since I was like ten years old.

  Thank you, Thisbe Nissen and T. Geronimo Johnson, for being such pillars of empathy and creativity. Thanks, Scott Bade, for the same.

  Thank you, Jennifer Kocis and Steve Chisnell, for showing me how to care about reading widely and writing creatively.

  Thank you, Susan Paley, and Emily Dumas, and Dean Hauk—there are people in the world who would have never become readers without you. You’re real-life superheroes.

  Thanks to my family, for being so relentlessly supportive and for never asking why I didn’t go to school for something else. Thanks for the endless supply of love and stories. Grandma and Nana, you kept us from sinking: thank you.

  Thanks to Molly Ker Hawn, for saving me from working at the US Post Office by sending me an email in the frozen heart of winter telling me you wanted to talk. Bonnie-Sue was right about you: you’re half editor, half lawyer, half superhero, and all badass (she was right about the mama moose thing, too). I don’t think you’ll ever really know how much good you do in this world.

  On that note: thanks, Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock, for being a voice of support since day one.

  Thank you, Sarah Dotts Barley, for taking a chance on me and for never telling me there were too many swear words or that any of the jokes were too dark. Moreover, thank you for bringing me into the Flatiron family—I can’t imagine a better home for Moses and his friends.

  Thanks, Noa Wheeler, for reading Moses’s story early on and helping get it into the shape it needed to be in.

  Thank you, Anna Leuchtenberger and Melanie Sanders, copy editors extraordinaire—I don’t know how you do what you do (or how you do it so well), but writers like me would be lost without you.

  Thanks, Bo Barley, for making sure the JAMA network doesn’t come after me with torches and pitchforks (and for explaining tension pneumothorax in terms I could understand37); thanks, Natalie, for the help with Ambu bags.

  Thanks, Keith Hayes, for the cover I never would have in a million years been able to design. It’s perfect, and everything I never would have thought to make.

  And finally, when I was seven or eight years old, a grizzled, well-read, tattooed, punk-rocking Lumberjack of Death from Detroit let me blast him point blank in the face with a baseball—just to show me it only stings for a minute. Thank you, Jimmy Doom, for teaching me to never be afraid of the pitch.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tyler James Smith is a graduate of Western Michigan University. After a stint as a mailman, he now works as an aide in a therapeutic school. Tyler lives in Chicago, and Unstoppable Moses is his debut novel.

  Twitter: @SethTrimley

  Facebook: @UnstoppableMoses

  Visit him online at www.TylerJamesSmith.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  One: My Hate Crime

  Two: Midwest Trajectory

  Three: A Mom and Dad Meet Their Son

  Four: Camp Stop This Feeling

  Five: Moses the Imposter

  Six: The Imposter in the Wild

  Seven: of Bruises …

  Eight: … and Buddies.

  Nine: Wheel Spin

  Ten: Smoke in Our Jackets

  Eleven: Treasure Hunters

  Twelve: The Nature of Thin Ice, Part One


  Thirteen: Machine Boy

  Fourteen: The Nature of Thin Ice: Part Two

  Fifteen: No Service

  Sixteen: Into the Fields

  Seventeen: Beatles vs. Stones

  Eighteen: The Numerous Heinous Crimes of Cecil Benson the Eighth

  Nineteen: Anthony the Asshole

  Twenty: Six-Mile Thoughts

  Twenty-One: Somewhere in Between

  Twenty-Two: Mom and My Other Half

  Twenty-Three: Harriet Tubman

  Twenty-Four: Buddy Behavior

  Twenty-Five: Wwcd

  Twenty-Six: Empty Spaces

  Twenty-Seven: Dead Life

  Twenty-Eight: Choices

  Twenty-Nine: Dogfighter

  Thirty: Here Be Tigers

  Thirty-One: The Entertainment

  Thirty-Two: The Love Song of Moses Hill

  Thirty-Three: Mimicry

  Thirty-Four: Snow

  Thirty-Five: Monster Lights

  Thirty-Six: Hello, Darkness

  Thirty-Seven: Coin Toss

  Thirty-Eight: End Times

  Thirty-Nine: Slow-Moving Light

  Forty: My First Nothing

  Forty-One: Search Party

  Forty-Two: 12:08

  Forty-Three: Spiraling Round …

  Forty-Four: Elephant Shapes

  Forty-Five: … And Around

  Forty-Six: Charlie

  Forty-Seven: Waves

  Forty-Eight: Animals

  Forty-Nine: Fuck That …

  Fifty: … And This Too

  Fifty-One: Fallout

  Fifty-Two: We, the Animal Four

  Fifty-Three: Evulsion

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  UNSTOPPABLE MOSES. Copyright © 2018 by Tyler James Smith. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.