“What?”
“Lazarus Burger,” he said.
“Good Lord.”
“Shut up. Festival’s not so bad, is it?” Lucas asked.
“Not so good, either,” I said.
“Well, have you seen her yet?” he asked.
“Ada? No. Have you?”
“No. But I saw Russell. He’s over there, by the face-painting booth.” Lucas pointed across the way to a small table surrounded by children that had been set up by my church.
The Quit Man sat in a wheelchair, connected to some sort of breathing machine. His face was swollen and bent to one side, his eyes larger than I remembered. His mother stood behind him, her hands grasping the handles of the chair and her head down close to his left ear. I watched as she pushed him down the narrow sidewalk and over to the petting zoo, where she parked him beside a bench and had a seat. The Quit Man no longer looked tough. He no longer looked mean. There was little to be intimidated by save for the pure amount of machinery enveloping his body. Just as Lucas was suggesting that we go check out the live snake exhibit, I saw Ada Taylor walk up to the Quit Man and give him a peck on the cheek. He smiled. I elbowed Lucas, who looked directly where I was looking.
“Shit,” Lucas said.
“You got that right.”
When one is watching the girl he thinks is his girlfriend whispering into the ear of her ex, he immediately imagines Russell Quitman suddenly yanking out the tubes from his neck, breaking free of his wheelchair, and lifting Ada Taylor off the ground in one quick swoop. He sees the Quit Man slowly plant a huge movie-star kiss on her lips and then put her down, laughing. His face goes from normal to zombie and back and forth. And behind them all the people cheer and clap and suddenly their faces too begin to shift and contort: Some drool, some develop sores, some hang their mouths open and begin to slide toward the laughing couple. And the boy with no brother stands alone in the center of the city gazebo, an army of zombies approaching. He turns to what he thinks is Lucas Cader to find none other than the Lazarus woodpecker seemingly floating beside him. He touches it to see if it’s real and it bites his hand. Now bleeding, he watches the zombies move faster, Russell and Ada leading the pack. She, too, is now one of them, and in desperation, he looks over at the bird and whispers, “Can you find my brother?”
“It just looked like any other woodpecker to me,” I said to my mom that evening in the kitchen.
“Yeah, but was it, like, huge?” she asked, stretching out her hands.
“It was big, but no big deal. I don’t think, anyway.”
“Lucas, what did you think?” she asked, dismissing my opinion.
“I thought it looked pretty amazing. It was a pretty good shot, too, right in the sky in between two trees, flying there like it had no clue it’s the biggest mystery in Arkansas,” he said excitedly.
“Dork,” I said to him, kicking him under the table.
“Cullen, just because you think it’s stupid doesn’t mean we all have to,” my mom said.
“I just think everyone’s making a big deal out of something meaningless, that’s all,” I responded.
“It never hurts anyone to think life gives you second chances. God knows we need more of that around here lately,” my mom said, tossing her dishrag onto the counter and walking out of the room.
Because Lucas had to go run some errands for his mom, I went out back and sat on the swing set that my dad had a friend weld together for us when I was six or so. It faced nothing but an open, grassy yard and a line of trees that began miles of woods filled with things making noises that used to keep me up all night. I began to whistle the song that Gabriel had jotted down on the folded piece of paper. I was known back then and still am for my remarkable ability to whistle any song I’d ever heard. I used to dream, when I was thirteen or so, that I’d hear about some national whistling contest and get to fly out to L.A. or something and win millions of dollars and be on the covers of magazines and have a trophy named after me.
As I sat there, I heard the tap tap tap of the Dumases’ screen door and heard someone walking around the side of the house. I looked over to see John Barling, a cigarette in his mouth and a phone to his ear. He was standing near the back corner of the Dumas house when he began to shout into the phone.
“Damn it, Kathy, let me talk to my girls!”
He said something else that I couldn’t make out before throwing the phone hard onto the ground and leaning his entire body against the side of the house. He stayed like this for a moment and then turned around and, crouching, began to reassemble the phone, whose battery had flown out. He looked up to see me swinging there. I did not try to hide the fact that I’d eavesdropped or that I was still watching his every move. He popped the battery back into the phone, flicked his cigarette to one side, and stood up. He began to walk toward me, his face emotionless.
“You mind?” he asked, pointing to the swing next to me.
“Go ahead,” I said, unable to think of anything better.
He sat down on the swing and tightly grasped the chains on either side of him. He did one quick push and was then rocking back and forth. I was barely moving. He slowed down after a while, putting his feet down onto the ground again, and scratched the back of his head.
“My wife won’t let me talk to my kids,” he said.
“Oh,” I replied.
“She says they don’t wanna talk to me, but that just doesn’t compute.”
“How old are they?” I asked.
“Valerie’s seven and Susanna’s about to turn three,” he said.
“How long’s it been since you’ve seen ’em?” I asked.
“Too long. I try not to think about it too much. I’m a shitty father.”
“Oh.” This is what I say when I’m uncomfortable.
“Ya know, Cullen,” he began, “your mind has a way of not letting you forget things you wish you could. Especially with people. Like, you’ll always try your best to forget things that people say to you or about you, but you always remember. And you’ll try to forget things you’ve seen that no one should see, but you just can’t do it. And when you try to forget someone’s face, you can’t get it out of your head.”
“I’ve been having trouble remembering my brother’s face,” I said to him.
“Is that right?” he asked.
“It’s like when I try really hard to imagine him doing something or remember the last time I saw him, sometimes his face is just blank. And then other times I’ll just be sitting in my room and all I see in my mind is Gabriel.”
“That’s the way it works, I guess,” he said. “Your mind never lets you call the shots.”
“Guess not,” I said.
“I know there are people in this town who think I’m a bad man,” he said, “but I could be worse.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah. I could be some traveling salesman, some con man taking everyone’s money or something. I could be a murderer. All I want is to prove to the world that the Lazarus still exists. I know it does. I’ve seen it. I’ve heard it. It called me all the way down here from Oregon. This is my destiny.” John Barling held one finger toward the sky, as if his “destiny” were floating just above it on display.
“I hope you’re right,” I said finally.
“What’s your destiny, Cullen?” he asked, turning to face me and looking directly into my eyes. I shrugged.
“Well, do yourself a favor and don’t start a family till you find it,” he said, coughing.
With that said, John Barling got up, lit another cigarette, and began to slowly walk back toward the Dumas house. He turned around once to wink at me and then kept right along. I picked back up with my whistling, closed my eyes, and could see nothing but my brother’s face.
Book Title #84: One Million Miles on a Stick Horse.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Place Where Things Go Away
Because life sometimes isn’t all that predictable and because the human body is of
tentimes the same way, Alma Ember and her husband Cabot Searcy did not have a baby as they’d planned. Instead they sat together on the floor of their small apartment’s sparsely furnished living room and held hands, staring at the television and both secretly wondering what would happen next. In his eyes, Cabot Searcy had perhaps rushed into this marriage, but did not regret it for one single moment. Alma Ember was beginning to doubt every decision she’d ever made.
“This place is a dump,” Alma said, standing up and walking toward the kitchen.
“Want some help?” Cabot asked, standing.
“Just stay outta my way, please,” she said, spraying the counter with orange liquid.
“Okay,” he said, sitting down on the couch and picking up the remote.
Beverly Ember had given up in those few weeks trying to be directly involved in her granddaughter’s life, questioning whether or not she had been overbearing or too nosy. She did, however, still hand Alma a check nearly every week, trusting that she would use it for food or rent. Alma would say thanks, would show a slight expression of guilt, and would kiss her grandmother on the cheek. Cabot Searcy had lost favor with his uncle Jeff when he impregnated Alma, leading to his being cut off completely. Now Cabot spent his days not looking for jobs, but pretending to as Alma served complicated coffees in various Italian-named sizes down the street.
Four months after Cabot found work as a satellite TV salesman, Alma Ember decided to move back in with her grandmother. Beverly was quite happy. Alma was somewhat relieved, but still sad. Cabot Searcy lost his job, would not get out of bed, and called Alma Ember fifty-seven times over the span of three days. This became his life. In between placing phone calls and writing long-drawn-out, pathetic, and often incoherent letters, Cabot continued his study of the very subject that had, unbeknownst to him, driven Alma away: the potential of humankind. Still reading from ancient texts, secret writings, and the Bible his mother had given him at age fourteen, Cabot had taken his curiosity to obsession. He stayed up most nights reading, copying interesting scriptures or writing his theories down in a book very similar to the one carried by Benton Sage. He had told Alma the day before she left that had God not killed the Grigori angels so many years ago, their baby would have lived. Alma cried silently in bed that night before tiptoeing into the bathroom and sitting on the edge of the tub with her head hung between her knees. She watched a few tears crash onto the gray linoleum floor. She wiped them away with her foot, then stood up and stared into the mirror. Splashing her face and looking up, Alma Ember focused to see if she could distinguish between the teardrops and water. Her eyes red. Her hair several days unwashed. Her hand tightly gripping the side of the sink.
This had not been the first time Cabot had blamed God for the loss of his child. In fact, he had begun to write down lists of all the world’s evils, as if he were building up an army of words to fight some heavenly battle. He had taken Benton’s notes and not blown them out of proportion so much as he had strapped an atom bomb to every letter of every word. Alma knew this, and so she left. She had little faith that he would realize how his own mind was deceiving him.
He was, in a sense, seeking to prove that the very creator of mankind was also its greatest oppressor. It all gave Alma a headache, and as his religious ramblings began to grow more frequent and nonsensical, Alma began to fear her once charming, seemingly normal husband.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
This May Be the End of the World
It was at some point in mid-July that my father began asking me about college. I’ll tell you this much: College was the last thing I cared about the summer that my brother disappeared and that Ada Taylor started sleeping with me. But my father suddenly seemed so preoccupied with it, hassling me to look at catalogs he’d sent for and to visit this website or that to get an idea of some campus halfway across the country that I had never heard of before. He suddenly wanted to know what my interests were. What I wanted to major in. What my dreams for my life were, and how I planned on making them come true. What impact I wanted to have on the world. To tell you the truth, it really all sort of pissed me off at first. There I was, seventeen years old, and the first time my dad showed me the littlest bit of attention was when I least wanted him to. Didn’t he know that all I felt like doing was fading into the background? Leaning against a wall and disappearing into it? Lying on the couch, hoping the cushions would swallow me up?
And even worse, he had my mom trying to get information out of me, asking random questions like, “Do you think you’re more right brained or more left brained?” and “If you had to pick between living on the East Coast or the West Coast, which would you choose?” I never told her what I wanted to give as my answer, that I would choose whichever coast my brother happened to be hiding on or locked in a basement near or buried under. I never told her that even if I did know what I wanted to be, I still couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Lily as long as I knew my brother might show up one day or that whoever was responsible for his leaving was still out there somewhere waiting to do it again and again and again until a thousand Cullen Witters were seeing zombies of their dead brothers standing by their beds at night. I would need to be there when he showed back up. I would need to be there to protect him. I didn’t give a shit about college, and I was tired of being made to think about it constantly. So I left the house one day and went to Ada Taylor’s house, and she wasn’t there. So I went to Lucas Cader’s, and he was sitting on the front steps outside. I sat down beside him. He could tell I was angry because he didn’t say anything. This is what Lucas knew to do when I was mad.
“She’s at his house again,” I said to him.
“Damn,” he said.
“That guy’s more appealing in a wheelchair than I am able-bodied. How sad is that?”
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” Lucas said.
“Sure feels that way,” I said back.
The next morning, as we sat in my kitchen, I promised Lucas we wouldn’t talk about the Ada situation. My mom, who had stayed over at Aunt Julia’s for three nights in a row, walked into the kitchen, set her bag down on the counter, turned to look at Lucas and me at the table, and said, “That’s it for me. Julia can take care of herself from now on,” and walked out of the room. Lucas grinned and shoveled another bite of waffle into his mouth. I got up and walked down the hall and into my mom’s room. She was sitting on the edge of her bed. She was not crying. She was not laughing. She did and said nothing.
“What happened?” I asked in that I-hope-it’s-okay-if-I-talk-right-now kind of way.
“We were talking about Oslo and how he was so cute when he was a baby,” she said.
“Wasn’t he on a billboard or something?” I asked. “Yeah. They put him up on the hospital billboard when he was a few weeks old.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Anyway, we were talking about that when she started saying something about heaven.”
“Heaven?” I asked.
“Yeah. She said something like she hoped that when we got to heaven we were all babies again.”
“Cool,” I said.
“And then”—my mother began to tear up—“she said that all she could do anymore was think about Oslo and Gabriel up there as babies, crawling around on a solid white floor together.”
Just as it had my mom, the thought of Gabriel not being on Earth anymore, and also of Oslo in heaven, started to upset me as I walked outside to take the trash out. I wondered if Oslo had, in fact, made it up there. I wondered whether or not mercy was given to someone who so continually screwed everything up. Then I wondered what made me different from him, besides the fact that I wasn’t a junkie. I had no real future to speak of. No goals. No aspirations. No desire to do anything but wait around for something big to happen, something miraculous to occur. Maybe Oslo had felt the same way, like what was the point of giving up these drugs that made him feel good when all he was doing here was waiting around for the good to start? But he was wrong. Was I wrong to
o? To be waiting around on the impossible? And was Aunt Julia right? Would we all turn back into babies when we died? If that’s how we started out, didn’t it make sense to think that we’d go back to that original form? That we’d be completely innocent again? That we’d know nothing of sadness or loneliness or boredom?
“You think too much,” Lucas said to me on the banks of the White River the next day.
“I think too much?” I asked, my voice raised.
“Yeah. You can’t just sit back and relax without analyzing every little thing,” he said.
“That’s what you do, Lucas!” I said.
“Only sometimes,” he said back.
“Just as much as I do, I’d say.”
“Whatever. That’s not the point. The point is, you—sorry, we need to learn how to just calm down and take everything in before trying to pick it all apart.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we always end up ruinin’ it before it begins.”
It was the nine-week mark when my mother stopped doing things. Things like buying bread and milk. Things like showering or brushing her teeth. Things like answering the phone sitting right next to her. She hadn’t been to the salon in four days, and so my dad found her appointment book and called all her regular customers to indefinitely postpone their appointments. I was sitting in my room the day that she started throwing canned goods and cereal boxes across the kitchen and into the wall. The first thing my dad shouted was, “Cullen, stay back there!” I was in the living room when she decided to start cussing out late-night television reruns, telling Ted Danson to kiss her ass and Mary Tyler Moore to go do something quite crude to herself.
My dad remained patient. He calmed her down. He watched her from all angles of the room. He brought her glasses of water with tiny blue pills. He looked at me the way one looks at you in a funeral home. The way you would look at someone who had just been given bad news. Still he remained consistent with his goal of finding me a college, talking over my mom’s sobs or shouts to tell me about some new school he’d read about in a magazine or some career that seemed to be headed in the right direction. I found it exhausting to listen to, but I didn’t quite have the heart to dismiss him altogether. He was trying, and I had no right not to let him.
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