The middle of the truck always felt endless. There’d be boxes of stuff packed so tightly that they’d cram up against the ceiling. Pulling the wrong thing made the towers fall.
To make things easier, I played little games in my head. Like, I imagined that if we worked fast enough, at the back of the truck, behind that final wall of washing machines and fridges, there would be something amazing: a bag of money, a baby, gold, anything. I’d choose something specific, though. If it was a baby, it’d be a lost child with a name: Cristie. We’d only know this because of the note left behind with her. I’d pull away a Whirlpool, and there she would be, little baby Cristie, a note tucked into the folds of the soft blanket she was wrapped in: Please take care. I know you are better suited than I am. Please, love her. I love her. I love you, Cristie. Goodbye. I love you.
The baby and the note would obviously be a shocking discovery even for the Specialists, and for, like, five minutes we wouldn’t know what to do. We’d take turns holding the baby, then, almost sadly, we’d call a manager, and he’d call the police. Of course, we’d stop working for the day. For years following, me, Cato, and Reese would all keep track of Cristie; we’d be secret faraway fathers, sending her anonymous little treasures, and she’d be known locally by some kind of nickname that fused baby words and home improvement stuff: Tool-born Tyke. Or whatever.
But when we got to the very end, all that work ended in a tall slab of nothing, always.
“On your mark, set, go!” Monkey called out from a tree. Lion leaped forward toward the base of the mountain to begin his climb. Lion looked back at Anansi, who was already far behind him. When my father became Lion, he made his voice big and mean. “You’ve grown foolish, spider,” Lion said as he began to climb the great mountain. “I am the fastest in the jungle.” He thought, I have already eaten the rabbit children and now I will win this race and you will have to give me your magic potion. Far behind Lion, Anansi walked through the lands slowly. His head was down, as though he were not interested in the mountain at all.
“Ah, Anansi, why don’t you run, oh?” Monkey asked. “Do you not want to save these poor rabbit children?”
“I have already saved the children, brother. Now I will embarrass this silly cat,” Anansi said.
“Ah, Anansi. Lion is already at the mountain. If you do not run now, you will surely lose.”
“You will see,” Anansi said. “You will see.”
Years earlier, when we’d had the house, my father had agreed to take my neighbor, Jerry, and me to the movies. We’d looked forward to it all week. My father told us we’d be leaving at 7 p.m. to catch the 7:30 show. The day of, my father’s car pulled into the driveway around 6:55. Jerry and I were in the middle of a third round of mashing our controllers. A Japanese martial artist kicked a mutant in the face. “Your father’s outside,” my mother called. His horn honked once, a long hard blow that almost carried my father’s voice on it. I felt him sitting in the car, waiting. We stopped the game and hurtled down the stairs. When we got outside, the slivers of green grass poking through the breaks in the driveway looked homeless compared to the fullness of the lawn.
Jerry looked at me, confused. “He forgot us?” I walked up to the mailbox. My father’s taillights were still climbing away up our street. I started waving my arms wildly, running hard up the hill. I wanted it to seem like a joke. Jerry ran with me. I was screaming, “Dad, Dad! We’re here! We’re here!” Jerry screamed, “Hey! Hey!” The whole time we scrambled, our arms waving like the blow-up thing outside the Nissan dealership. “Dad, Dad!” I called. He slowed down for oncoming traffic, then turned and sped off onto Route 42.
We walked back sweaty and dazed. The fun of our game chasing the car was lost. Jerry said that maybe it was a joke and that we should wait for him to turn around. I said, “Maybe.”
We looked to my mother for answers. She poured juice. She watched us drink quietly. After he drank his, Jerry went home. When Jerry was gone, I said, “Why would he just leave us? It was a minute.”
“It is just a movie. It will be there,” she said.
“But why did he leave us? We were right there.”
“Be patient with him. He is not patient. So you must be patient,” she said.
“It isn’t fair,” I said, slowly explaining facts.
“It will be there. He wants to do things his way. He’ll take you later,” she said.
I was disappointed because I thought it was obvious that I’d never want to go with him anywhere ever again.
“Mother Earth, Mother Earth,” Anansi called out. “Mother Earth.” The earth shook, as did the foam mattress when my father pulled and pushed it quickly.
“Anansi, you have called my name,” Mother Earth called back to Anansi, her voice in the wind and the trees.
“Beautiful Mother Earth, I have a small request to make of you.”
“You ask before you give, Anansi?” The earth trembled. Monkey fell out of his tree.
“No! Never! Great Mother, I give in promises and work before I ask,” Anansi spoke, and bowed his head to the ground.
“What have you given?” Mother Earth asked.
“I’ve planted these seeds to you and promise they will add to your beauty,” Anansi said without bringing his gaze up from the ground.
“I’ve seen the work you have done. What is it that you request?”
“I ask only for a small breeze, a kind wind down this path and up the great mountain,” Anansi said.
“My son’s getting ready to graduate, too,” Reese said to me one day in the truck. I grabbed two boxes of beware-of-the-dog and stay-off-the-grass signs.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“He’s a junior. Reese Junior. We call him RJ.”
“Cool,” I said. “Where’s he thinking of going?” I had never heard of Reese’s son before.
“Probably he’ll do a year or two at the community college, then we’ll see from there,” Reese said.
“I might do that, too,” I said. Most people I knew had already committed to glimmering universities. I’d told the school upstate, the school in Connecticut, and the school in the city I’d see them in the fall and that they should expect my initial deposit soon.
“Nah, you won’t,” Reese said. He was encouraging me. He was sure of my future in a way I was not.
With a small blade of grass in his hands, Anansi felt the great push of Mother Earth. Her hand carried him down the path and up the great mountain. Lion struggled only a few feet from the bottom. Anansi screamed from the top of the winds. “You’ve got rocks in your belly, you silly cat. I knew you would do evil so I put rocks in the rabbit children’s bed.” Lion roared and tried to swipe Anansi as he rode his blade of grass up the great mountain. He could not. On the mountaintop, Anansi laughed and laughed.
He reappeared a week before graduation. Three and a half months later than expected. Three months without any contact at all. I was with Reese. That day there was no truck, so they put us in the paint section to support. I saw him before he saw me. I hoped I looked as different as I felt. I felt strong. He noticed me. I felt headless. He waved wildly. He started walking faster, as if he’d just then realized he was late. He wore his jean shorts and his leather sandals. He called my name twice even though it was clear I’d already seen him. He reached me. He put a hand on my shoulder.
“Dad,” I said. I thought, There’s food in the fridge because of me. I went to prom. I imagined you gone forever, and I survived.
I thought, Thank you. I don’t know why.
Reese looked up from the cans he was arranging. “Is this your dad here?” he said, taking off a glove and offering his hand. “You’ve got a fine son.” My father took it and said in a friendly laugh, “Yes, he’s a big man.” He turned his attention to me. Reese walked away from us to the other side of the long aisle near different shades of tan and green. “I just got in. Is this your job, waiting around with paint?” He laughed. “I don’t want to keep you from your worki
ng.”
He patted me on the shoulder again.
“Dad,” I said, not wanting to be calm but not knowing how to do anything but breathe.
“I’ll be waiting in the lot. You need a ride, right?”
I said, “Yes, I do.”
Light Spitter
He wants them to know they made him this way. So he twists a thumb of red from the tube and draws a large F on his forehead. It takes him too long to realize he’s placed it backward. “Dang it,” he says to himself. But he doesn’t wash it away and start over. He’s past the point of mistakes. He doesn’t make mistakes anymore. They were wrong about him. They were for so many years. They were. He sees that clearly now. He is not, has never been, and he never will be wrong. He completes his title, being careful to draw the red onto his head in bold letters they won’t be able to forget. The name they gave him, Fuckton, in lipstick. Even with a backward F it’s glorious. He grabs his gear, then heads out to find his destiny.
Safe in her home, Melanie Hayes says, “Love you, sweetie. Keep at it, all right? We want a better semester, right?” She can imagine her daughter’s eyes rolling but figures the nudge is worth it. She’s a good student, her daughter, but she’s human, and sometimes she gets distracted. They both get distracted, but they’ve always been a good team. The two of them, now that her husband had opted out of their lives, would have to be especially good together. “Love you,” she says again to her college girl. That’s what she wants to leave on. It’s still early in the semester. She smiles to herself as she listens to her daughter’s voice, which sounds annoyed but also soft in that way Deirdra is.
Fuckton grabs Bluntnose, his green comb, and slides a pale finger across its teeth. His hands tremble. He closes his eyes so he can properly appreciate the small plink of the teeth bending, then snapping back into place. He brings the comb to his head. Yes. Each strand of hair will shine, slick and erect. The mane of a battle-ready soldier. Oh, he will look good for the annihilation. For this momentous occasion, he is even wearing his contacts. Contacts that almost beefed the whole morning because he’d brushed his teeth before donning them, getting some paste on his fingers, causing his left eye to feel aflame for several minutes. But no matter. Minor mishap. The apocalypse wanes naught to Colgate. A red eye is of little consequence. How many more red eyes? How many great tears will they weep? Ten, twenty, hundreds for each of his. Fuckton pulls Bluntnose through his hair once more. It kisses his scalp so gently. How he will shine on this day of bright retribution.
He lives on the campus and still, no friends. He tried the ensemble-choir mixer. Still no friends. He tried chess club, had handily vanquished the club treasurer. Still no friends. He tried to charm the Campus Democrats at a canvassing meeting and watched a gaggle of liberals as they giggled and guffawed and very clearly texted one another about him. Calling him a dotard of some kind, no doubt, after he’d summoned a tremendous courage and got up and said his piece on the merits of conservative fiscal attitudes. When he’d ventured to the Campus Republicans during their Free to Hate rally, he had been promptly squirted with the water guns they’d had for some reason because, apparently, they’d gotten wind that he’d been consorting with the Democrats and thought him a spy of some kind. Either way. No friends, some enemies even. But it’s always been like this. His whole life. And yet that’s what makes what’s to come so much easier. He walks into the warm day feeling as a giant might before it crushes peasants underfoot. At the library door he watches a young woman walk out. She pauses, holds the door for a moment, and when Fuckton stares at her, smiling, she looks at him in a bored, searching way. “Hi,” Fuckton says. She says nothing in response. Crinkles on her nose show that she’s annoyed he’s even tried to speak to her. The insolence is welcomed. Fuckton walks in giddy with the power in his hands, the plain-sight secret of it. How, on the other side of the next few moments, he will be everything he’s always deserved.
From across the library’s first floor, Fuckton sees a girl holding her place in a closed book with her thumb. She has a phone to her ear. Hair wrapped neatly in a scarf. Smiling. She’s the one.
“Easy, lady. I just got here. Don’t worry,” she whispers, then hangs up. She needs to focus. It’s the first week of her junior year at Ridgemore University, and she’s in the library.
She’s there because this year she’s finally being honest with herself: she doesn’t get any reading done in bed. Ten, maybe twenty pages, and she knocks out. Sleep. Then she’ll wake up two hours later and be disappointed in herself and hungry (a dangerous combination as the first seems to enhance the second), and there are still people who say things like, “Wow, Deirdra! You look so good. I hardly recognized you!” even though all the weight she’d lost recently was weight she’d gained freshman year, so it never really feels like a compliment exactly.
But last semester, after falling asleep in bed, instead of getting back to the book when she’d wake up, she’d call up Terry and the two of them would go to the dining hall to eat and chat, which would mostly be Terry explaining his boy trouble as she gave him advice he’d later regret ignoring. She’s good for that. Advice. She doesn’t mind listening. She’s straightforward, even blunt. People appreciate it in the long run. After eating her dining-hall salad, she’d be tired again and cuddle into her bed to watch something simple and funny on her laptop, or if she was lucky, she’d feel guilty for the second dinner and head to the gym. Either way, she wouldn’t go back to reading, which she needed to do if she was going to get an A in her contemporary lit class and all but guarantee a spot on the dean’s list: a nice gift to her mother, who desperately needed and deserved something nice considering what happened with Dad and how badly Deirdra did last semester.
A voice she doesn’t know says something; she is half-annoyed and half-relieved when she is yet again forced to look up from her book. Deirdra just barely lets out an “Oh,” and then she is dead.
There’s a shriek, and Fuckton looks around and sees people sprinting away from him. “S-sorry,” Fuckton says before he can stop himself. A ridiculous thing to say, he knows. He stares at the dead girl, the one he himself, with the help of a gray/black pistol nicknamed Whiptail, just banished from the earth. He waits for the glory to fill him. Eyes wide, he absorbs the body in front of him more intimately. The face is so broken. It terrifies him. There’s blood everywhere. On his lips, in his hair. He looks at her one more time, then Fuckton turns and runs. He trips on a rug edge and falls on his knees. Whiptail blasts a shot off into the floor. The boom scares Fuckton just as much as it scares all the running, screaming people. So much running and screaming. Fuckton gets up and sprints into the bathroom. Inside, there’s a boy washing his hands. “Uh,” Fuckton says, and points Whiptail at the boy. The boy turns, then flinches and crumples to the tile floor as if someone just ripped his spine from his body. He’s pleading. Fuckton pardons the boy by going into the stall without blowing his head off like he did to the girl outside. That really happened. Fuckton’s body is shaking. He wants to disappear. From inside the stall, which Fuckton promptly locks shut, he hears the boy get up and run out of the bathroom. Fuckton grabs Bluntnose from his pocket and tries to slide the comb through his hair. “Dang, dang, dang!” Fuckton screams. He wipes his forehead and barely registers that a red waxy residue sticks to his fingers. His hands won’t stop shaking.
Above him, an angel wrought from the soul of Deirdra Hayes watches him closely. There is another bang. Fuckton, the killer, drops in the bathroom stall. The angel smiles, and two black horns scrape out of her head, and then she leaves the bathroom.
The ghost of Fuckton walks from the bathroom, drawn to the angel floating over her former body, which is limp and bent over the back of a cushy chair. Deirdra and Fuckton see each other.
“What happened?” Fuckton asks.
Deirdra turns her head and tries to spit on Fuckton, but all that comes from her mouth are slim rays of light. After trying and failing to do anything but shine, she says, “You kille
d her—me. You killed me.” Fuckton stares at the angel. She looks just like the dead girl on the chair used to. Then he looks at the body.
“Oh, yeah. That feels like it was ages ago. My bad,” Fuckton says.
“I’m still bleeding,” Deirdra says, pointing to the rush pouring from her body’s face. People have cleared out around them, and though Deirdra and Fuckton are there in the library, they both know and feel they’ve been untethered from time and any particular space.
“What about me?” Fuckton asks.
“You shot yourself.”
“Did people see it?”
“Nah, but I did. It was the first thing I saw like this.” Deirdra gestures toward herself and her new wings. “I could have helped you, but I didn’t. I watched you do it. I let you.”
Deirdra’s wings are small and shiny. They flap slowly, gathering and stretching like a jellyfish. The horns on her head are long, black, and sharp. “So what now?” Fuckton asks.
“I’m an angel now.”
“What am I?”
“I think you’re kind of nothing,” Deirdra says. “You don’t get to be anything special.”
“Nothing?” asks Fuckton.
“Yeah. Nothing. Look,” Deirdra says. She points to Fuckton’s chest, where an empty space the size of a fist pulses in his ghost body.
“Whoa,” Fuckton says. He puts a hand in his chest and touches the rim of the empty space. “Kinda like Iron Man.”
“No. Not like Iron Man. That means pretty soon you’ll be nothing.”
“How come you know everything?” Fuckton asks.
“When you get like this, it comes with some info. It’s flowing into me still.”
“Oh.”
“I guess it’s supposed to be fair, or something. I can fly now. I have wings and stuff, see. You have a nothing, ’cause you’re nothing.”
Friday Black Page 12
