The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  We called him Preston, after a buddy who'd bought it in Baghdad.

  Our apartment in Monroe took less than an hour to clear. We're both used to living light. Neighbours who'd known us might be suspicious, so we weren’t sticking round. Once out of Louisiana, we just kept heading West. The chaotic aftermath of the hurricane helped. Lots of people were on the move, lots of families were uprooted. People accepted that story, and to my surprise some helped out when they saw we had a baby with us. Moms gave us formula and diapers in grocery store lines. We were even allowed to stay free in a garage room for a few days.

  For the first few years of Preston’s life we travelled around a whole lot. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, even California – but not the touristy bits. Just hick little towns where government was not expected to stick its nose into private family business, and sprawling arid suburbs filled with immigrants where no one gave a shit about more incomers. I worked. With my background and willingness to do some heavy lifting, it was easy enough most places for me to get a job. Paramedic, ambulance driver, morgue attendant, hospital orderly. Austin mostly stayed home to look after the kid and smoke weed.

  He didn’t like Preston much, though it’s not like he was a difficult kid. I don’t think they ever bonded. I guess it’s harder for men, if it’s not their biological child. It’s not like they want or need kids the way we do. I'd been waiting years for this, praying in my desperation to a God who'd stopped listening when I was twelve and Pop got cancer. Maybe He'd heard me at last. Maybe He just got sick of me bugging him, and gave me what I wanted to shut me up. I was there, in the right place at the right time, for my miracle baby to be born.

  Preston was my whole world.

  Funny kid, though. I mean funny ha-ha. He liked to laugh, even though his loud hooting chuckle got on Austin’s nerves. “He sounds like a fucking chimpanzee,” he'd complain, popping another can of beer. Preston liked to play tricks, hiding in unexpected places and jumping out to startle you. Lady was always pretty nervous of him and stuck to Austin’s feet all day, safety in numbers I guess. She was a real submissive dog.

  Preston never seemed to notice that Austin and Lady weren’t so keen on his company. He just loved to goof around. And physical contact – climbing, clinging, swinging on our arms, tugging Lady’s tail – was how he interacted with us.

  It took him ages to learn to speak, you see. He was healthy in most every other way, so even though he never got over that anaemic-looking pallor and I had to slather him in sun-block to stop him blistering, he would spend a lot of time outside climbing trees and digging in the dirt, like any normal boy. Well, except he preferred to do it at night. With Preston, the switch was either on or off. Ever since he was born he slept a lot during the day, and woke up burning with energy around evening. I guess it was just more comfortable for him, since we lived in sunny places Mid-West and West, what with his skin and his eyes. Those beautiful big green eyes of his were sensitive to bright light. I bought him his first pair of shades – oversized green plastic with frames in the shape of stars – when he was six months and he never went out without them after that.

  There was no question of registering for a public school. We didn’t have the paperwork and besides, he'd have been bullied, what with the mutism and the weak eyes and the white down of his barely-there hair. So homeschooling was the obvious solution. Austin was about during the day and I'd do my bit at night. He wasn’t what you'd call a scholar, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of. There are a lot of children with special needs out there. I've seen worse than Preston. And I relaxed a lot once he started speaking.

  Oh yeah … the speech thing. He hit the babbling stage early on, chattering away to himself, but it took until he was four until it morphed into English. That’s a long time to think that there’s something wrong with your child. He understood us alright – he wasn’t deaf or anything – but he just didn’t talk back in anything but gibberish. Sometimes I thought he had his own private language – you hear about that, don’t you? Twins, mostly?

  I just know I was so pleased when he called me “Mom” at four that I cried, sitting in the kitchen, and he stared at me from behind those star-shaped patches of plastic in confusion, and then patted my face and hugged me and scampered off.

  He was affectionate. That was the sweetest thing about him. Even when he grew up he never grew out of hugging. He didn’t have school friends to teach him it wasn’t cool. He didn’t have a peer group to bully him and tell him how to think and how to act, so he didn’t care what others said about him. In his quieter moods, during the day, he'd sit and talk under his breath to himself for hours, maybe rolling a die-cast truck back and forth, or turning a piece of wood over and over in his hands like it was the most fascinating thing in the world. At night he was full of such spontaneous joy and energy that sometimes he'd go climb out on the roof and sing wordlessly to the moon. He was a true free spirit.

  So okay, the speech thing was worrying, but that all worked out. And the eating did too, eventually. Preston was always a slightly-built child, not like so many kids nowadays, and I guess that was because he had feeding issues. I don’t think it was Lady’s fault – he soon took to normal formula and milk well enough – but he was picky with solids. No bread or pasta or rice or anything that'd build him up. He flat-out refused vegetables of any sort, even baked beans, so I had to give him vitamin tablets. In fact the only vegetables I ever got him to eat in his entire childhood were sauerkraut and – when we moved to LA – that stinky Korean stuff, kimchi. He liked hot dogs straight out of the packet, chicken nuggets (as long as they'd been left to cool), cheese and bacon.

  Lots of kids are fussy eaters.

  I came down early one morning when he was three, and able to walk and get into any cupboard he could reach or climb up to. I found him with the refrigerator door open, sat in the pool of light, chewing with obvious delight on an open pack of bacon rashers. He looked up at me and burbled happily.

  After that he ate all his bacon raw. It never seemed to do him any harm. I reckon we mollycoddle kids too much these days.

  *

  We were renting on the west side of Fresno and Preston was seven when Austin lost his cool. I came home one night after my shift to finding Preston huddled in the lean-to den he'd made in the basement, nose to the angle of the drywall. He didn’t want to look at me. He wasn’t crying precisely – like I say, he never cried – but he was so subdued that even my hugs couldn’t raise much reaction. Austin was kicking angrily about the back yard, beer can in hand, popping off shots at empty bottles. Even in our neighbourhood that was not the sort of behaviour that let you go unnoticed.

  “What the hell d’you do to Preston?” I demanded, standing under a sky without stars, everything bleared by the glow of city lights.

  “Me?” he laughed. “Ask your shitty little kid what he did.”

  There was shouting then, and – after we got the shouting mostly over – a conversation where it finally emerged that he'd taken Preston out to shoot rats with the BB gun on the vacant lots round here, because I’d been nagging him to do something with the boy, find some common ground, teach him some of his own skills. They'd passed a raccoon, dead and flattened on the road, and Austin had told Preston to come away and stop poking it.

  Now I knew Preston had always been fascinated by roadkill, ever since he was old enough to toddle out of the gate. Some kids are a bit morbid like that, it’s perfectly normal, and I hoped it meant he had a leaning toward science. He had a collection of bones in his bedroom – desert-dried lizards, the sun-bleached skulls of rabbits and gophers and coyotes, and even a steer skull complete with horns that we'd found when we stopped on Route 66 that one time. I bought him picture books on biology and encouraged his identification skills.

  That day they'd shot a few rats, and then Austin stopped for a smoke and when he looked round the boy was missing. He searched right round the waste ground where they'd been stalking, and then set off home, and on the way he'd found
Preston hunkered down over that stinky old raccoon, pulling the dried-out flesh apart with his nails and chewing it down.

  He'd marched the boy home and whipped him with a belt.

  “You did what?” I hissed.

  “There’s something wrong with that boy! You know there is – he’s not right in the head! Like that time he tried to bury that little Olsen girl in the back lot…”

  “Austin, that’s just the sort of dumb shit stuff kids do – the tunnel fell in! He didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “That’s not the way the Olsens saw it. He’s not right, Gina. He’s a creepy little fuck and he turns my stomach.”

  “So you hit him with a belt? What sort of a pussy does that to a kid?”

  There was a big argument that night, and Austin ended up sleeping on the couch while I tucked Preston into bed with me. I was only thankful there were no marks on his poor little body. Austin hadn’t hit him that hard, it seemed.

  Two days later I got home and found Austin had gone – taken the Hummer and his weed and half the cash from the box hidden behind the furnace. Only half though, I’ll say that much for him.

  Lady was distraught for days. She mourned more than I did. And way more than Preston.

  I tried making it on my own, as a single mom. It was hard work. I had no school to leave Preston at, and didn’t know any homeschooler families I could trust him with. I ended up doing late shifts and taking him with me into work at the funeral parlour. Luckily my boss liked me enough to turn a blind eye. Giving Preston a colouring book and crayons, or a few comic books, was usually enough to keep him quiet for a few hours. Then I'd set him sweeping, or counting stores, or throwing out old flowers or something.

  That came to a halt when I glanced up one day after inserting the trocar into a client’s abdomen and found that Preston had snuck into the embalming room. He'd pulled the cadaver’s arm over the edge of the embalming table to where he crouched, and he had her fingers in his mouth and was chewing on them. There was an expression of pure ecstasy on his face.

  I gave up then, and rang my mom in upstate Maine.

  *

  That conversation wasn’t the easiest one of my life. It was the first time I'd spoken to her since I’d enlisted and, so she reckoned, joined the ranks of the Big Government plotting to take away her guns and her Bible. And when, two weeks later, I drove up the dirt track and in through her gate to find her sweeping the crispy yellow fall leaves off her porch, she didn’t exactly light up with pleasure at the sight of me, or the child she'd known nothing about until now.

  Preston and Lady piled out of the car and ran round in circles, astounded by the sight of so many leaves, so many tall trees. Mom folded her arms and stared at us.

  “What’s his father’s name then?” she asked.

  “Austin.”

  “We likely to see him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Thought not.” She seemed satisfied that I'd lived down to her expectations. “You weren’t married then?”

  “No.”

  She looked at Preston, who'd stopped in his tracks and was gazing up at her. “I don’t approve, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s a funny-looking thing. Come on in then.”

  She never took to Preston much, any more than she'd showered affection on my brothers or me. But she let us live under her roof, and it was the ideal place to bring up a boy like mine, one who liked to run and climb and dig, and was best off on his own. Our lot backed on to woodland without any fence to show where one ended and the other started. There were miles of damp forest and scrubby fields and tracks mostly used by felling machinery. The nearest town was a faked-up colonial-era hamlet besieged by tourists during the blaze of fall and almost deserted the rest of the year round. Mom went in twice a week, once for groceries and once for the service in the white-painted church that stood in its lumpy overgrown graveyard where Pop was buried.

  I didn’t go to church, though Mom’s disapproval was icy. I wasn’t sure I could cope with any more of God’s answers to my prayers. Besides, my Sundays were precious. I found work further down the valley at a turkey-packing plant in the next town, but it was a long drive and long shifts, six days a week. Not the best job, but there were perks in the form of raw wings and feet and bits not fit for human consumption, which the foreman let me take home in a plastic bag to feed my dogs, as I told him.

  Preston throve on the fresh air and the good food. He put on a real growth spurt. The dried chicken bones became the centrepiece of a new art project – a wire and Krazy Glue conglomeration that started off as an attempt to reconstruct a whole skeleton and then morphed into a complex mounded thing with towers and buttresses that put me in mind of that weird cathedral in Barcelona. You know the one. Preston called it his More Digyon but couldn’t explain to me what the words meant. He found more bones for his collection too, out there in the woods where he wandered at night. Most of a porcupine, and the jaw of a bear, and then the whole head of a moose, its bone green and furry with moss – Christ I hope it was just moss – which he proudly hauled in to the house by its antlers and his grandma screamed at him to take back outside. After that he had to move his collection to an outhouse. That wasn’t the first or the last argument he had with her, though. She thought he was “kinda creepy for a boy his age” because he didn’t want to go play with the other kids in the area. Telling Mom he was used to his own company and making his own amusements cut no ice with her.

  But he was always waiting for me when I drove in, no matter how dark or wet it was. Sometimes the shine of his green eyes in my headlights was my first sign that I'd reached the narrow turn off the road. He'd climb up on the roof of the car and ride back that way to house, laughing at every jolt.

  There were two disquieting episodes after we moved in. The first was quite early on, the day of the first snow. I remember the clouds were so heavy that it felt like night was falling, and the breeze raw and wet, flicking the slushy flakes in my face. Preston had been sent out to collect from the mail box at the roadside, and when he didn’t come back I started to worry at the failing light. We'd only been here a few weeks, after all, and he was just seven.

  I set off down the track to find him, bundled in my coat. Lady had taken one look at the weather and refused to follow me, retreating back to the fireside instead with her tail between her legs.

  Preston was down at the mailbox – but he was talking to a man. That sight put my hackles up so fast you'd think I was a bitch-dog myself.

  “Preston!” I called sharply, straining my eyes to make out what the guy looked like. He was broad-shouldered but hunched, covered up in a hooded coat that I could somehow tell was shabby and not clean, even before the wind brought a musty unwashed stink to my nostrils. He looked up sharply at the sound of my voice and then backed away behind the fence and jogged off into the shadows of the road. Loped might be a better word for it. By the time I reached the intersection he was nowhere in sight.

  Preston looked up at me, puzzled, by the clamp of my hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “Who was that man? What was he saying to you? Are you okay?”

  The poor kid was confused by the interrogation. “I dunno. He said … he said he was a relative.”

  That threw me. I didn’t know of any relatives left round here. “What was his name?”

  “He didn’t say. He just asked me a bunch of questions about where I came from and stuff.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  “I dunno.” He had that bored-with-the-conversation-now look that kids do so well. “Is dinner ready?”

  “Soon. Come on. I’ll ask Grandma if she knows any relations of hers here.”

  “Not Grandma. My dad. He said he was from my dad’s side.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that. He couldn’t mean Austin, could he? Austin hadn’t made any attempt to get back in touch with me – and why should he? We walked back to the house talking about Thanksgiv
ing, and how we might get enough snow this winter that we'd have to dig our way out, which Preston was thrilled by.

  *

  The other incident was years later, and much worse. It signalled the start of the end.

  Lady died. She was an old dog by then, stiff with arthritis, and since the woods were too wet and cold for her southern tastes she never went further than the yard, keeping indoors whenever she could. She had a convulsive attack one evening and died in the night as I sat up stroking her ears. Preston mourned quietly, and we dug her a grave right under the tree line. He made her a cross out of planks and went out to sing his croony little songs over her grave every day for a week.

  Mom was in a worse mood than usual, her belly griping with pain. She snapped at Preston more often than usual, and when we heard the back screen door bang late at night she forced herself scowling to her feet, complaining that she wanted to lock up and what was he thinking of going out at this time, shouldn’t he be in bed?

  I volunteered to go fetch him, grabbed the flashlight and headed out into the dark. He wasn’t with his bone collection in the outhouse so I circled the yard boundary, picking out the white trunks of birch with my beam. “Preston? Time to come in!”

  A glint of emerald green gave his eyes away. He was over by Lady’s grave again. I stomped through the long grass calling his name, but the closer I got the more misgivings crowded into my belly, and by the time I could see him clearly I was cold all over.

  He was crouched over the grave, digging at the bare soil with his hands. He glanced up at me and his eyes flashed like blank green suns over the shine of his bared teeth.

  “What are you doing? Stop it!”

  “I've got to get her out!” he gasped. His face was contorted, his eyes narrowed against the flashlight.

  “What? No, Preston!” He wants her for his collection. “She’s a pet – we buried her, remember?”

  He seemed confused. “She’s all alone and I want her back!” Drool slicked his chin – I thought I'd badly underestimated how upset he was at his loss. “She can’t dig herself out and she wants to be with me!”