“You can’t let them take him, Clyde,” she continues. “Even though we were leaving. If they get me. You can’t let them have him. Even if you hate me now. You need to protect him. Protect the baby first. Protect the baby before me. Let them have me. You understand? Take the baby and run. Run out of this goddamned junkyard and just run. Get beyond the walls and run, Clyde. Anywhere. Just run. But you keep our son safe. You understand me?”
“Ye—yes,” I tell her, shocked at her order, at the selfless bravery of it, but equally shocked at my resignation to follow it.
The baby continues its blaring screech.
The monsters continue to pound and rattle The Cellar Door.
The monsters wail and bleat and shriek.
Thump-thump. THUMP-thump. THUMP-THUMP.
Thump-thump. THUMP-thump. THUMP-THUMP.
THUMP-THUMP. THUMP-THUMP. THUMP-THUMP.
THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP!
A crack of light. Then long, clawed fingers slipping through where the door has slid aside.
And the baby won’t shut up. The screeching. The wailing.
And the monsters answer in kind.
And there goes the door, flung up into the bright blue sky, flipping and twisting and disappearing from the rectangular view we have down here in The Cellar Door.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to all the light flooding this hole. Around the edges of our framed view, three hideous, scabbed up, hunch-backed, long-limbed, fanged monsters.
Their hollow chests heave. They twitch and twitter. Shake and clack their hard teeth together.
Joyce pushes the child into my chest, tells me to run when I can, then stands straight up, ready to take on, or at least distract, these fearsome invaders.
I’m paralyzed just by the sight of her bravery, her ease with sacrifice, and shamed at my inability to take action.
Then the air shatters beneath a massive CRACK, like thunder rippling over The Great Beyond. Then there’s another CRACK. And another.
As if ready to attack and take cover from the air breaking apart all around them at the same time, the monsters tumble into the living grave with us, tackling Joyce and slamming her into the dug earth.
One of those things is right atop me, smashing the baby into my chest, muffling its wails. I struggle beneath the sinewy monster and slide out from under it, clutching the baby to me. We’re covered in blood and mucous.
“Stop!” an unfamiliar, muffled voice shouts. “Just hold it right there, son.”
There’s a man. A man in a gasmask, black pants, and black jacket. And boots. Big, mean old boots. He’s pointing a large gun right at me, slowly sidestepping toward me. My eyes flick and flitter between him and the four or five other gasmasked figures holding big guns and slinking toward The Cellar Door.
Not knowing what else to do, I hold the baby out to them—like an offering, or perhaps as a plea for them not to hurt us. I don’t know.
The sun beats down on us from that blue blue sky.
I hold the baby up into that blue sky and he’s quieted by the blue breeze and the light on his face.
The trash mountains around us twinkle with relief now that all the wails and shrieks and thumps and cracks and shouts have ceased.
Joyce, dazed, stands up and stares at the tangle of lifeless monsters filling the four-by-six foot hole. But they aren’t monsters. I see that now. They’re other men in gasmasks. Men with tanned skins and veins crisscrossing their bulging necks and arms like rivers on a map. Weapons I recognize to be flamethrowers fizzle out next to them in their readymade grave. They’re just men, these monsters. And I can’t tell the difference between them or those gasmasked creatures coming at us now. I can’t tell the difference between them and Joyce, either. Or the baby.
When Joyce emerges from her haze, she snatches the child from my hands and holds him close, the both of them sobbing. Joyce doesn’t even see the people surrounding us. These new Out-of-Towners.
38
They set up camp in Monster Island. There’s thirteen fucking Out-of-Towners in total. After pulling us out of the hole in the ground, they quickly sprayed the monstrous men with gas or something and burned them with their own flamethrowers. They filled the hole in after they were satisfied the creatures were nothing but ash and bone.
It took Joyce a long time to snap out of the state she was in. She was all fight. Only fight. She was ready to claw those monster men to shreds with her bare hands while the baby and I ran in the opposite direction. When there were no more attackers to unleash her fury on, the Out-of-Towners accepted the brunt of it. She swung and kicked and scratched at them but they overpowered her and eventually she realized they were calling her by her name. Eventually she realized these were the people that abandoned her to a kingdom of trash many years ago.
After subduing Joyce, they got her back to Monster Island and set up a kind of medical unit right in our little shanty. They had medicines. They injected her with needles. Someone even went between her legs and stitched her up down there. The baby was placed in a basket full of warm, clean-looking blankets near her bed, never far from Momma’s sight.
They did this all without their gasmasks, of course, and they all had their faces.
One of those humans has long, thin, white hair. But much of it still holds a flaming red hue, even though he’s wrinkly and ugly and terrible.
He’s Kenneth, of course. He and Joyce made Grace. And I ate Grace. I ate their little girl. Because it’s what I thought Momma would want. And Papa. And from behind the walls of my Trash Kingdom, Grace has been poisoning me from within ever since.
Right now Kenneth sits in our shanty, bedside, holding Joyce’s hand while she sleeps.
I’ve been watching them from nearby massive garbage heaps, of course, safely perched on the peaks. When they pulled me out of the ground, I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what to do. They asked me my name—asked if I was OK. They offered me water. After they calmed Joyce and burned the monster men, one of them grabbed my upper arm and started walking me westward. He said those three monster men had killed and eaten a half-dozen of their people and that they had been hunting them for days. These monster men were cannibals, he told me. “Eating your own kind. They’re monsters,” he explained. He said not to worry, though, because there were fewer and fewer of them these days. People were starving, but resorting to such monstrous acts helped seal the fate of these monsters, he said. The act of cannibalism was an act of self-destruction. They were dying off, these monster men, or being hunted into extinction. Civilization couldn’t allow such ugliness for more reasons than one, of course. He said the world’s a better place than it was only ten years ago. And getting better. Behind the gasmask, he told me everything would be alright—that I should just come with them. But I wrested my arm from that fucking Out-of-Towner’s grasp and ran away as fast as I could. He called out to me. He said, “Son, come back! We’re not gonna hurt ya!”
But I know better, don’t I? I mean, look at this place. This junkyard used to be a Kingdom before the fucking Out-of-Towners showed up. Now it’s just a place of trash. It’s just a goddamned graveyard. It’s nothing.
It’s nothing.
But I’ve been keeping an eye on them, knowing all along how this ends now. I know the ending because this is all like a book. And I’ve read so many books, which has made me smart and wise and able to understand the world as it is—not as we want it to be.
My folks didn’t accept the world as it was. I see that now. They tried to make a life out of trash. They tried to build a life from trash. They didn’t accept that their world was trash. Just trash. That was it. They escaped the dying world, divorced themselves from humanity, told us stories of happier times that didn’t belong to us, wallowed in filth, and called it a life. They called trash life. Insanity! Then they went one step further—they made me. And I became a king. And I became a murderer. A cannibal. And I grew up ready to lose everything.
Because I w
as fated to be a monster.
But what did they expect, bringing me into a world like this? A world like this should not rage, rage against the dying of the light. A world like this should have gladly walked into the welcoming darkness.
A world like this needs monsters to extinguish the final flickering flames of life.
I just did what I thought Momma and Papa wanted me to do. I just wanted Momma to be happy. But now I know that everything they wanted was wrong. Everything I’ve wanted, too.
It’s been a few weeks since these new Out-of-Towners arrived, but it wasn’t long before Joyce was up and about, smiling, chatting, laughing, and looking more alive than she has since the first day I laid eyes on her. I’ve sat here, atop mountains of garbage, watching her breastfeed our son, and she kind of glows. Like, metaphorically. Not from radiation or anything like that. It’s beautiful, though. I look forward to the feedings. I don’t even feel the urge to run down there, shove the child aside, and put my own mouth to Momma’s nipple and feed. My jealousy, my righteous indignation, has been sapped away by the birth of my son. I just like watching her and the boy, together, though the sight makes my lungs heavy and stomach ball up.
She must have looked like this when Grace was born. She must have glowed twenty-four-hours a day.
These new Out-of-Towners haven’t done much. They haven’t come looking for me. They haven’t ravaged my Kingdom, searching for god-knows-what. They’ve barely left Monster Island since setting up camp there. They’ve given all their attention to Joyce and the baby. To making them well. And they do look well. The boy, he’s ruddy and noisy as ever, and I’m able, now, to tell the difference between his cries and a monster’s wail. It’s not too different. But different enough once you get to know it. Yes, he’s going to be a strong boy. You can see it in his face. You can hear it in his cries. And he has a lifetime of crying ahead of him.
Still, I’ve kept my distance. But, sometimes, late at night when the moon’s dangling overhead, all big and bright, I’ll sneak down into the camp and listen to Joyce softly sing to our child. She sings him beautiful songs about grass fields and blue skies. She doesn’t sing anything about cradles falling out of trees and babies being stabbed through the back by all the broken tree limbs their tumble caused. She doesn’t sing about spiders or plague or bridges falling down or dying in your sleep. Just flowers and sun.
A few nights ago, I fell asleep right up against my old shanty. I woke to Kenneth gently shaking my shoulder in the morning, asking if I was alright. He asked if he could get me a cup of coffee or something to eat. I scrambled away from him and scurried back to the safety of my rubbish heaps.
Kenneth is sleeping in my old shanty now. He’s sleeping in there with Joyce. At first, I could tell there was a sense of unease between Joyce and Kenneth. Once she was up and walking around, socializing, they kept a timid distance. That distance shortened each day, until they were sitting right next to each other, shoulders and knees touching. Then there was laughter and glancing caresses. Then full embraces. Now, I suppose it’s like the two were never apart and I wonder what it is that makes people feel that way.
And Kenneth is easy and natural with my child. He holds him gently and doesn’t protest when the baby cries and becomes unruly. He just rocks him, shushes him, and sometimes sings to him, too. It almost always works. Joyce, of course, has the same power over the little Prince.
My son, the once and future King of Monsters, sleeps soundly in the arms of Out-of-Towners.
Once the Out-of-Towners had Joyce in good enough shape to walk around again, they buried Sam. For a few days, Sam lay out there, all alone, covered in massive tarps the Out-of-Towners had thrown over him. He wasn’t really all alone, though. I’d go and sit by his side some nights, when I was certain the Out-of-Towners would not see me, and I’d talk to him. I’d tell him I was going to fix his bike. I apologized for lying about that. There’s plenty of bike parts around. I could make him ten bikes if he wanted. I told him he was a good boy, just like Joyce had often said. I thanked him for slowing down the monster men enough that Joyce and the baby and I could be saved, even though I was not worth saving. Even though his legs crumbling beneath him was not his own choice. It was just his fate. To be our savior when I had thought it would be me.
I never removed the tarps covering him. I could not bear to see the damage those monsters had done to him. Instead, I imagined he was under there sleeping soundly. Just sleeping.
And Sam being a mountain of a man, himself, they decided to bury him where he laid. They dug the hole, then ten of the Out-of-Towners (a mix of men and women) leaned into Sam and rolled him into the grave. That was when I saw he had no face, and his massive abdomen had been splayed open.
Before the funeral, Joyce came calling for me. She called my name several times. She let me know they were burying Sam. But I didn’t answer her. I kept my distance.
What else could I do? Her people—the Out-of-Towners—hunt and kill my kind.
39
“Why did you leave us?”
“I—we didn’t mean to…”
“But you abandoned us—me, Terrance, Sam.”
“We had to run. They ambushed us. I…”
“And now Terrance is dead. And poor Sam. I probably would have died, myself, walking out into that desert. I don’t know what I was thinking trying that right after the baby. But this place makes you crazy, I think. Shit, I might still be crazy.”
“You’ve just been through a lot. We all have.”
“You sent us here, Kenneth. And then you left.”
It’s late and I’m once again sitting with my ear to the shack that used to belong to me and Joyce. Me and Momma. They’re talking in hushed voices, having just gotten the baby to sleep. The other Out-of-Towners are either asleep next to the fire dozens of feet away, or in tents pitched here and there throughout Monster Island. A couple of them have taken up residence in Sam’s shanty.
“I… yeah. I know. I’ve regretted it for many years, Joyce.”
“You did it out of jealousy. You sent us here out of jealousy.”
“And I’m ashamed. I’m a small man in many ways. A boy.”
“You all are,” Joyce says.
“Yes.”
“But Sam… why poor Sam?”
“I was being spiteful. I was. But I wasn’t going to send the two of you here without protection. You had Sam and the dogs. We weren’t leaving you here. Not for good. Not even for that long. That was never the intention.”
“Sam was a human being, Kenneth. He wasn’t just one of your goddamned dogs you can sacrifice like trash.”
“I know. I didn’t—we didn’t expect to leave you here. We were running for weeks—months maybe. They were relentless. They just kept coming out of the ground. They live underground, most of them. I—well, you know I’m not the best navigator. That’s not why these people choose to follow me.”
“Choose to follow you.”
“I believe they choose, yes.”
“Keep your voice down. The baby.”
“I was lost. I got us all lost. We hadn’t any idea where we’d left the three of you. It was like the earth swallowed this place up. Then we found it. We just found it. We were chasing those murderers and they led us right here. Not that I recognized the place as any different from any of the other massive junkyards around. But once we slipped in through that hole in the wall over there, I knew. I knew you were here. I knew we’d found you again.”
“Are you going to continue to be jealous of… of whatever it was that Terrance and I had?”
“No. No, I’m over that. Of course I am. It was years ago. And I shouldn’t have let it get to me in the first place. I had no right.”
“No. You didn’t.”
I wait for a while. I wait for Joyce to mention me. To say, “What about Clyde? Will you be jealous of him too? After all, he is the father of my son. The most beautiful baby in the whole wide world.” But they say nothing. They’re done talking. They
’re asleep already.
40
“There you are,” Joyce says, sticking her head through the windowless window of my hotrod.
I’ve been lounging in the backseat with a book. In fact, I’ve been spending most of the last several days here in the one last spot that’s truly mine. I’ve had enough of the fucking Out-of-Towners. If they want The Kingdom, they can have it.
“Where’s the boy? Where’s my son?” I ask, setting the book down on my chest.
“He’s… he’s with Kenneth. He’s fine. His name is Gracey. You should come see him.”
“Gracey? You named him Gracey? You… named him?”
“Yes, of course I named him. Well, we named him. All of us talked it out. We all agreed to name him after my little girl. It seemed fitting.”
“But I am the one who names things.”
“Not always, Clyde.”
“What are you doing here?”
“We’re leaving.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Now.”
I thumb the pages of my book and don’t say anything.
“Clyde.”
“What?”
“Come with us.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“Yes. You shouldn’t stay here. It’s not healthy. Clearly. Clearly it’s not good for you. You need to be among other people. And you should be there for your son.”
“You want me around Gracey?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re his father.”
“But you said you needed to get our son far away from me. You were on your way out into The Great Beyond with him, knowing I couldn’t follow.”
“Listen, I can’t make any promises. You’re sick. You’re sick in that head of yours. If you don’t get any better, you can bet I will keep Gracey away from you. We all will.”
“We?”
The Sun My Destiny Page 20
