“Where is he?” I ask, following her lead by pulling my stick from the fire and inspecting the meat.
“Don’t know. They set up camp a few miles northwest of here. They’re not there no more. And we don’t have our dogs no more, so we can’t just go traipsing all over that wasteland out there—we tried. Anyway, Kenneth sent us hiking to this dump—”
“It’s not a dump,” I say, under my breath, staring into the fire.
“to look for some things. Like canned food, weapons, batteries—car batteries, mostly.”
“There’s a few of those in The Used Car Lot!” I tell her, happy to be of service.
She looks at me as if I’m speaking Japanese the way I must have when I visited Hawaii with Momma and Papa all those years ago.
“The used car lot?” she asks.
“Yeah, you already found it though. It’s over that way,” I tell her, pointing southeast.
“Did us no good,” she says, chewing.
My shoulders slump. “Why not?”
“Those cars are ancient. They ran on fuel. There’s not enough of that around anymore, kid. We need batteries for cars that run on juice. They’re all out of charge by now, surely, but back at the camp we have—or, we had a guy that was good at that stuff. He could raise electric stuff from the grave.”
“Like Dr. Frankenstein!” I tell her, pleased to show off how well-read I am.
She chuckles. “Yeah, kid. Just like Frankenstein.”
“Did you see it?” I ask through a mouthful of rodent meat. “Did you see The Library?”
Again, she looks at me quizzically. “Um, yeah. We saw it. All those bookshelves off that way?” she asks, gesturing. “Yeah, we saw that. You know, kid, if you’re trying to keep a low profile, you shouldn’t be setting up places like that—like that place and that outdoor living room you’ve got set up over that way. That’s how we knew there was someone here.”
“Oh.”
“But we’re the good guys, so… lucky you,” she says, shoving a big hunk of meat between her glistening lips.
“No you’re not,” I tell her. “You’re the Out-of-Towners.”
“The what?”
“Nothing. It’s just that… it’s just that Momma told me about you people—what you did. What you are. And she told me exactly what to do with you all.”
“She did, did she?”
“Yeah.”
“And what, exactly, are you supposed to do with us all?”
“Saw off your heads. Eat your hearts.”
Joyce laughs almost loud enough to wake Sam, who stirs in his sleep.
“What?” I ask. “I could do it!”
“Shit, kid, you’re mother wasn’t a very nice lady, was she? I’m assuming she’s dead, right?”
“She was nicer than you!” I scream, and Sam stirs again.
“Kid, people shouldn’t be killing each other. There’s too few of us. We have to stick together.”
“I could eat your tits,” I say and, fast as a stone from my trusty slingshot, she reaches out and slaps me. My yummy tea drops to the dirt and spills.
“You watch what you fucking say to me, kid,” she says, standing over me, jabbing a finger in my face. “You show me—you show all of us some respect. We’re the only people you have in this whole fucked up world right now. And we all have to stick together if we’re going to survive. You hear me?”
My eyes start to water. I rub the red-hot handprint on my cheek and look down at my yummy tea that spilled. I can’t help it: I start bawling like a little goddamned baby.
“My Momma was nice! You don’t know nothing! My Momma was so much nicer than you!” I scream and throw my stick into the fire. I turn away from her and lie down on my side, my back to the fire, and try to stifle the tears and the snot.
At night, Momma came to me. In my dreams. She was there, standing in the fire, naked. She asked me what I was doing. I asked her if the fire hurt. She said nothing hurts. Stepping out of the fire, she placed her hand against the handprint on my face. “They’ve marked you,” she said. I told her they didn’t. “There’s no monsters,” she said. “They’re lying. It’s what they do. They’re brainwashing you, making you dependent on them. There’s no monsters, except for them.” I told her that they seemed OK. I said that I don’t really think they’re going to hurt me—that if they wanted to, they already could have. Momma told me to skin them alive. To hang them over the wall. I said I didn’t want to do that. She placed her hand to the back of my head and guided my mouth to her breast. “Drink,” she said. And I did. But it wasn’t the sweetness of mother’s milk that splashed against my tongue. It was blood.
17
“So what’s your name, mutt?” Terrance asks as we clamber up glittering slopes of Recycle Center Jamboree Mountain full of aluminum cans and scrap metal. It’s an arduous and dangerous climb, what with all these sharp things, so I’m being extra careful. Terrance keeps talking and talking and talking like a goddamned dick-face. It’s distracting and ruining my concentration.
“I asked what your name is,” Terrance repeats, annoyed.
“Clyde,” I spit out, doubly annoyed.
“Clyde, huh?”
“Yeah. King Clyde the Destroyer!”
Terrance chuckles and nearly stumbles as he reaches the summit. I pray to God in that split-second that he falls, chin out, right onto a rusty point of tin, piercing his stupid tongue and brain.
But he doesn’t.
“Clyde the Destroyer? That’s pretty stupid,” he says, surveying my Kingdom from his perch on the mountaintop.
In that moment, I choose to ignore him, and God, too, since God chose to ignore me.
“Why are you just asking me my name now?” I ask.
He spits, pulls a packet of something from the inside pocket of his black jacket. He opens the packet and dribbles some brown stuff onto a small piece of paper, licks the edge of the paper, and wraps it. He stuffs the packet back into his jacket.
“You don’t name things you don’t wanna get attached to, mutt,” he says, lighting what I now recognize to be a cigarette. Then he narrows his eyes and scans the mountain ranges snaking through my Kingdom with their jagged backs of trash.
“What?” I say, nearly reaching the summit, myself. “And I just told you my name! It’s not mutt!”
“We didn’t know if we was gonna keep you,” he answers, then shuffles down the slope, a cascade of metal skating down behind him.
Once he’s at the bottom, he looks back up at me and I scream, “I can’t be kept! I’m King Clyde! King Clyde, you fucking peasant!”
Again, Terrance chuckles, his shoulders hunching. He takes a drag on his cigarette and pivots away, walks down the grey path like a loosey-goosey scarecrow.
“Here,” he says, taking the cigarette back from me. “You just put it between your lips, like this… and breathe in, through your mouth. You’re not doing it right. You need to breathe in through your mouth, from your throat. You’ll feel it when you do. You’ll feel it in your lungs.” He takes another puff and hands the cigarette to me.
I know how to smoke, of course. I just like being shown how.
I do as he says and I feel the smoke slither into my lungs. It tickles and I cough, which makes Terrance laugh. I laugh, too, through the fog of smoke before my face.
“There ya go,” he says, clapping me on the back and retrieving the cigarette. “Do you like it? It’s good, huh? This is good stuff.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “It’s good stuff.” He pats me on the back and laughs again.
We’re sitting on a downed telephone pole at the base of AT&T Mountain, not too far away from The Memory Palace. Terrance said he’s taking me out hunting. I asked what Joyce was doing and he said she was out hunting, too, since he was wasting time trying to teach me to hunt. He said I’d drag him down and we’d probably not kill even the tiniest mouse today. I told him I’m a great hunter—that I’ve downed dozens of birds in my time! He said birds are easy—there
’s nowhere to hide in the sky. I tried to rebut him but it was useless.
Now we’re taking a “smoke break.” Smoke breaks are important, Terrance told me, for keeping the spirit up. Hunting is hard work, he said, and one must take time to rejuvenate. That’s what smoke breaks are for.
“Where’d ya get the tobacco?” I ask, having smoked only old butts (ha!).
“At the camp,” he says, spitting tobacco bits from his lips and pointing over his shoulder. “At the camp we have some stuff. Stuff like this tobacco, which is far less stale than most. It’s good stuff.”
“Yeah, it’s good stuff,” I tell him, taking the cigarette from him and inhaling. “What other kind of stuff do you have back at the camp?”
“Oh, you know… coffee. Sometimes we have booze. We have three hens and one rooster. They ain’t too healthy so we don’t get much eggs, but, sometimes, there’s eggs.”
“Eggs?” I ask, mesmerized.
“We got one goat, too. So, when that thing’s feeling up to it, we can get a few squirts of milk out of it from time to time. It’ll probably be dead soon, though.”
A light breeze wafts over my Kingdom, bringing with it all the familiar and wonderful scents of my land.
“Where are you getting all this stuff? Where’d you find a goat?” I take another drag, relish the feathery weight in my lungs, and return the cigarette to Terrance.
“Camp moves. Moves here and there. We come to places like this and mine it. Sometimes we come across a town—you know, the skeleton of a town. Sometimes that happens and we get lucky. We did pretty good, actually. Had most of everything we need. We…”
The garbage mountains lean over us, listening.
“Goddamn Kenneth,” he says.
“What about him?” I ask. Terrance looks at me. Looks away. Pauses.
“But, like I said, we had the goat. Them chickens. Oh! One time, we found a box of Hershey chocolate bars, but it was mostly rotted. Like, the chocolate had gone all white and powdery. Some of it was good, though. ‘Course, we also found some medicines. We usually have medicines. Which is a big deal. Or, Kenneth has them, I guess. I suppose that’s good. We’ve got some of that back at the camp. But it’s all kept under lock and key so no one gets too handsy with it and starts eating up all the painkillers. I tried it once. That’s why I get sent on these stupid expeditions. Hell, might be why they up and left us.”
“Just for eating Kenneth’s painkillers?”
“They ain’t just Kenneth’s. But, yeah. I mean, he doles them out to us. He says he just has to keep them safe, though, you know, in case anyone gets hurt and really needs ‘em. Makes sense to me. I just get so bored and—well, have you ever been drunk, mutt?”
“Of course. I’m a man,” I tell him. “Men get drunk, right?”
“Well, you know how that makes you feel good?” he asks and I nod at him. “It’s like a thousand times better than that. A thousand times.”
“Wow. Where do you find medicines like that?” I ask as we continue to hand the cigarette back and forth. The sun just set behind The Swill Alps and the sky’s gone twilighty.
“Towns used to have places full of that stuff. Sometimes we find it. We got a couple chemists, too, and they’re pretty good at making medicines out of stuff we find. Kenneth keeps it all under lock and key, though.”
“Yeah, you said. Hey, Terrance, why are you being nice to me?”
“I ain’t being nice to you, mutt. I’m just killing time. And doing what Joyce tells me.”
“Sure you ain’t just scared of me? I mean, now that you know I can kick your ass?” I ask, completely serious now.
“You can’t kick my ass, mutt.”
“Sure I can. And I did!” I say, taking the cigarette from him, smoking it down to a nub, then stabbing it out in the grey earth. Terrance watches me do it, seems about to say something, then changes his mind.
“You didn’t—you can’t kick my ass. You just caught me by surprise, is all.”
“Sure. Sure. I could gut you. I could saw your head off like I did that dog of yours.”
“Don’t start talking about my dogs now,” he says, his eyes aimed at mine, full of watery red rage.
“Sorry,” I say, not meaning it. “I’m sorry I did that. But my Momma—”
His face changes, the instant rage draining away. “What happened to your moms, mutt? Your pops?”
“They died. Can you roll another cigarette?” I ask, pointing at the pocket I saw him take the tobacco from.
“Shit, I know they died. How’d they die?”
“They just died,” I tell him as I stand from the telephone pole and start walking down the grey path scattered with debris, giant trash mountains to my left and right. “Come on,” I yell over my shoulder, “I thought you were going to show me how to hunt.”
18
About five months after Papa had The Unfortunate Filing Cabinet Calamity, Momma went missing for near a week. I didn’t look for her after that first day, the second, the third, or the fourth, because she had been real mean to me around that time. She kept calling me a “bad boy.” She told me I had done bad things. She said I shouldn’t have touched her that way and I didn’t understand. Everything I did, I did because she told me to. Momma also said I killed her. She told me I killed her when I murdered Papa. But I didn’t kill poor Papa! I don’t remember anything about it. He was suddenly under that filing cabinet, but it wasn’t me that put that big old metal thing on top his head. Was it? But Momma said all these nasty things and she would punch me right in the chest any time I got near. It knocked the wind from me damn near every time. I couldn’t even cry.
Besides that, Momma had taken to disappearing a lot around this time. I’ve no idea where she went, but one time I saw her leave The Kingdom! It was pure madness but I wanted to see what she did next, so I didn’t call out to her. I didn’t cry out, “How can you leave The Kingdom after all the scary things you’ve told me about The Great Beyond?” So, anyway, she got down on her belly and slipped through that hole in the wall at Monster Island. I waited for days for her to come back. I was certain the monsters had gotten her and eaten her face off. I was still crying about that when she did finally come back, but she didn’t even notice. She was all goofy and happy. I chose not to ask any questions because I liked seeing Momma happy, even if she could barely form a sentence.
Anyway, on the fifth day I went looking, but not very hard. After a few hours I found myself at The Used Car Lot in my favorite hotrod with my skinny wooden gal, hauling ass, burning rubber, popping wheelies, or whatever the shit it is that hot-stuff Hollywood Stuntmen did before God decided to throw the whole world into Hades. But I vroom-vrooooooom-vroooooooooooomed that day away before nearly rubbing all the skin off my pecker making sweet love to my gal. Later, when my gal told me she was pregnant, I told her that it couldn’t possibly be mine and skedaddled my way back to The Memory Palace lickety-split.
Ha!
Anyway, on the sixth day I went out looking again. Again, I wasn’t trying none too hard. I knew she’d be back of her own accord, soon enough. And, like I said, she was being mean and I didn’t really want her around anyway. Like, in the middle of the night, after making me feel real good and the both of us having gone to sleep, she’d wake up and start screaming. Really screaming! And she’d call me a monster, kicking and punching and pushing me out of the tent. Then, bug-eyed and sweaty, she’d close the tent flap and I’d be all on my own to sleep by the waning fire. Another time, we were strolling to The Library where Petunia was going to read Paradise Lost to us because, at that time, The Library used to have Special Events. On the way there she looked down at me with a face full of disgust and she shook her hand from my grasp. She appeared dazed. She asked me who I was and why I was touching her. I told her to stop fooling around and tried for her hand again. Momma smacked mine away. I giggled and even snorted a little, because it was all just a big old game, right? And I tried once more to snatch her hand back only to have Momma sma
ck it away, hard, and then grab me by the shoulders and shove me down. Before I could even begin to cry she was sprinting off in the other direction. I called out to her but she never turned back. Another time, I woke in the middle of the night, my limp hand smacking Momma’s belly. I realized she was grabbing my arm and kind of jamming my hand into her belly. I thought she was trying to get me to touch her where she liked me to so I attempted to move my hand down there but she slapped me and told me to hit her. Momma stood up and yanked me from the tent floor and my dazed sleepiness and told me to hit her. “Hit me right here, you little shit,” she ordered, pointing at her naked belly, the tent aglow with the firelight outside. Standing there, I grew scared. I started shaking. “Hit me, you fucking loser!” she screamed and I said, “Why, Momma?” She grabbed my arm and started jabbing my hand into her belly again, over and over, her lips pulled back, her eyes wide, her hair mad and a mess. “Because you’re a big bad monster killer. You’re a big bad monster killer. You’re a big bad monster killer,” she kept repeating, over and over. “Momma?” I said. She went silent, threw my hand away, stumbled back and slipped under the dirty blankets on the tent floor, turning her back to me. “You’re useless. I wish you were never born,” she murmured before I left the tent, afraid to let her see me cry again.
I didn’t understand. I’d even found her a gasoline can with a bit of gasoline in it around that time. She’d spent days in the tent and when I’d ask her if she was sick she’d say, “No, baby. Momma’s not sick. Momma’s feeling just fine. Better than ever, sweetie,” her words slow and drawn out and she’d tell me I was a “good boy.” Then she’d have me lie down with her for a while. So, she was feeling great! Just like she said. I thought things were going pretty well. But I was wrong.
So there I was, on that sixth day after she went missing, strolling around, skipping as best I could in these big old rubber boots, swinging a bit of rope and whistling to myself when I came across her. She was at the foot of some nameless garbage heap, on her back, paper refuse scattered over her, and a clear plastic bag over her head. The bag was fastened with duct tape wrapped many times around her throat. In her still-clutched hand there was a little brown plastic bottle. It said “Benzodiazepine” on it. I wrote it down so I could look it up at The Library. It was medicine and medicine that had expired decades ago. I wondered where she found it or if she’d been stashing it away for a special occasion, like this one. I didn’t have to wonder if it still worked. Momma was a grey-blue and there was condensation on the inside of the plastic bag around her head. Her milky eyes were open and her belly was round, distended. “Momma?” I said, kneeling down beside her, taking her hand.
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