by Abby Geni
He sniffed the air. “You stink,” he said.
“You stink.”
“Truth,” he said. “Let’s see what time it is.”
He pushed himself upright, grimacing in pain, his wounded arm curled protectively against his belly. His hand was a sight to see: mangled and mottled, two fingers reduced to stumps. The scabs had peeled and fallen off, revealing new, intact skin that was mauve and tender to the touch.
His leg was in a similar condition. The deep gouges had narrowed, sealing themselves shut. They looked like tattoos now, red lines inked across muscle. His calf was bumpy and uneven, the limb weary and sore. He still needed a great deal of rest. He was better but not well.
I watched as he shuffled to the door of the bunker. Cautiously he tugged it open. A cool breeze spiraled inside, and both of us inhaled gratefully.
“It’s dark out,” he said. “Near midnight, I’d say.”
I sprang to my feet and pushed past him. I lived for the nights. As I mounted the basement steps, I felt the wind pick up, kissing away my sweat. I knew that it was warm summer air, but it felt like an arctic gust after the stuffy tomb behind me. I stared around at the ravaged neighborhood. Nothing looked man-made now that the darkness had washed away the colors. The heaps of rubble might have been hillocks. The defunct appliances might have been boulders. The splintered remnants of the telephone poles might have been trees. I heard cicadas chiming, the hoot of an owl, and the flutter of bats overhead.
The tornado was a gift, Tucker often said. It opened my eyes.
Over the past few weeks, he had explained this to me. Most people, he said, were not capable of understanding the plight of the animals. They were too sheltered to comprehend it. Too safe. Even if they knew the facts and figures, they could not imagine the full measure of that kind of devastation.
That’s how I used to be too, Tucker said. The tornado changed me.
It had stripped away the facade of human civilization. It reminded him that he was an animal too. The scientific terms—loss of habitat, dead zone, on the brink—were not just words anymore. He knew what it felt like from the inside now.
It’s the end of the world, he proclaimed more than once.
Now, standing in the inky wreckage of our former home, surrounded by broken shapes and silence, it was easy for me to believe him.
“Hey,” Tucker hissed behind me. “Come on back.”
I crept down the moldering stairs into the crater of the basement again. My brother moved the beam of the flashlight step by step, lighting my way.
“I’ve got some good news,” he said.
“What is it?”
He tipped the flashlight up, highlighting his face from beneath. His upper lip and the underside of his nose flared gold.
“It’s time to leave,” he said.
I gasped. “Really?”
“Really and truly.”
He smiled, his face still lit from below, eerie but cheerful. I dashed toward him, plowing into him, hugging him with all my strength.
“Thank you, thank you,” I murmured into his belly.
He laughed, patting my shoulder.
“Get your stuff,” he said.
I moved fast. I did not want to give him a chance to change his mind. During our time in the shelter, Tucker offered no indication of how long we would have to stay. For me, our departure had shimmered like the light at the end of a tunnel, but I was never sure how far away it might be. Every time I asked, Tucker would pause as though checking some interior chronometer and say, “Not yet.” From the start, he made it clear that he was the gatekeeper of all knowledge, both the wide world and our small part in it.
I scrambled around the shelter, snatching up a grimy T-shirt, my teddy bear, and a pair of jeans crumpled in a corner. I began to pack the remaining cans and bottles of water, too, but Tucker told me to leave them. We would get fresh provisions once we were on the road.
When I was done, I shut the door with a bold flourish. There was a wonderful finality to it. The car was where we had left it, half hidden in the rubble. I had checked on it every so often, verifying that our avenue of escape was still available.
Lugging my backpack, I moved toward the stairs.
“Wait,” Tucker said.
Something flashed in the gloom. A silver shape. A pair of scissors. He must have found them on Daddy’s workbench—what was left of it.
“Come here,” he said.
My heart sank. Slowly I set my backpack down.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yes.”
The first cut was the hardest. Tucker gathered my hair up into a ponytail. He nudged my head this way and that, examining my skull. The blades were not sharp enough to sever the ponytail cleanly; he had to hack and grind, yanking hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Then I heard the scissors close. My locks swung forward again, falling only to my chin now. He had removed a solid foot of ringlets.
I moaned. Nine years old. Rigid and openmouthed.
Tucker tossed my former mane to one side in a clump. It landed with a thud, a dead thing, bloodless and filthy. Years of my life were caught up in those curls. My father probably tousled them long ago. Jane often French-braided my long hair. Darlene spent hours combing out the tangles.
Tucker slid the scissors past my cheek. His expression was absent of pity. I felt no pain as he kept cutting, which made the loss worse somehow. More unsettling. I wanted there to be throbbing or blood, something to signify the profundity of what was happening to me.
The process took a long time. I closed my eyes, unable to watch. My brother did not speak, but his voice rang in my head anyway. His lectures swirled through my brain as his hands worked and the scissors danced.
Let me tell you about the Classification of Wildness. This is important. I expect you to remember it.
A blade slid against my throat. Tucker hummed in concentration.
Level One is Wild. It refers to the animals that are born in nature and die that way. They live their whole lives untouched by humans.
His hands fluttered over my forehead. He chopped an uneven shelf of bangs, and then he sheared them off entirely.
Level Two is Feral. These animals start out with humans—domesticated or caged—but they get free. They go back to nature and live a sort of halfway life. Neither one thing nor the other. There’s only so much rewilding they can do.
He began cutting close to my skull, slicing away what remained. Shorter and shorter. Still no pain—nothing physical, anyway.
Level Three is Tame. It’s the most dangerous kind. Wild animals that become accustomed to humans. They stop being afraid. If you feed the birds in your neighborhood, they’ll start to rely on you, and if you quit for any reason, they’ll starve to death. If you feed a deer one time, it’ll go off and approach some hunter hoping for a handout and get itself shot. If you feed a bear, it’ll turn into a menace. It’ll break into somebody’s house to get at the fridge or rip a tent apart to reach the cooler. Eventually it’ll have to be put down. When you tame a wild animal, you’re killing it.
Tucker was working slower now, trimming the crown of my head. The scissors seemed to move at the midpoint between my mind and body. He was severing both my hair and something more, something interior, snipping away at the membrane of my thoughts, vivisecting my identity.
Level Four is Domesticated. Dogs and horses and cows. These animals have lived with people for so many generations that it’s changed them permanently. Their brains have evolved to become dependent on us. If you let them loose in the wild, they won’t know what to do.
Behind me, Tucker grunted. I felt a stabbing pain at the top of my ear. Something wet began to dribble down the side of my neck.
And Level Five is Human. There’s nothing else like us in the whole animal kingdom. We change everything we touch. We destroy most of it.
The crest of my ear was throbbing. I lifted a hand and gin
gerly palpated the place. Tucker had sliced away a tiny wedge of my flesh, and in the manner of all head wounds it was bleeding profusely.
I sighed in relief. Pain at last. This was just what I needed: an objective, physical indication of trauma and transformation.
“Hold still,” Tucker said.
He tugged off his T-shirt and balled it up in his hands. Bare chested, he leaned toward me, mopping the blood off my throat. He applied pressure to the wound, which made me grimace. Then he circled me, examining his work.
“Done,” he said.
He handed me a broken wedge of mirror and arranged the flashlight so I could see my reflection. The change was remarkable. I gaped at the stranger staring back at me. I looked like a younger version of Tucker. The child he had been, perhaps, before I was born.
The world around me was different, too. My vision was wider, unimpeded by the frame of my curls. The air was too close now, touching secret places on my body, the breeze kissing behind my ear and stroking my bare nape, an intimate caress I did not welcome. The sky was too broad. Every gesture felt alien. There was a weightlessness about my skull, and when I moved I no longer felt the comforting swish of my hair against my shoulders.
My mind felt lighter too—and not in a pleasant way. Something was missing, organs of the psyche, invisible but essential.
I was only nine. I did not yet have the language to name what had been taken from me.
But Tucker seemed to read my thoughts, as he so often did. He cupped my chin gently in his fingers.
“Abracadabra,” he said. “Reborn.”
21
We drove for miles. We drove for days. First it was back to the tawny station wagon, timeworn and unkempt, with a dent in the side that had obviously been made by somebody’s foot. Next it was a pickup truck, brown with rust and grime, the license plate so filthy and faded that I couldn’t make out the numbers. Then it was a green sedan with a fluffy pair of dice hanging from the rearview mirror, as well as a crucifix on a beaded chain. The upholstery smelled like cigarettes. The engine stalled below ten miles an hour and overheated above fifty.
I named each vehicle—Slowpoke, Dirt Face, Stinker—even though Tucker had warned me that none of them belonged to us. Whenever a new car presented itself, we would discard the old one like a snake shedding its skin. We left Slowpoke after a week. Tucker parked it behind a convenience store in a town so small that there was only one streetlight, blinking yellow. We left Dirt Face by a tumbledown farm. I was not sure whether Tucker had learned to hot-wire an engine in our father’s garage or during his time away from us. He told me that we needed a quick and continual turnover. He did not want us to be linked to a particular car for too long.
It was July, and we were always on the move. Tucker had a plan, but he had not told me much about it yet. We’re going to make a difference, he said. We’re going to change the world. Sometimes he would dig a map out of his backpack and unfurl it across the hood. In the blazing sun, he would stand sweating beneath his baseball cap, staring at the image spread out before him as though it contained a prophecy. Hovering at his side, I would try to see what he did in the network of colors and symbols, the paper rumpled from incorrect folding. Tucker had circled a town to the west of us: Amarillo, Texas.
But he did not seem impatient to get there. There was time to wander, to get lost along the way. We stayed on the back roads. Tucker said that we needed to avoid the highway. There would be traffic cameras, speed traps, too many witnesses. So we drove through cornfields, down dirt roads, the undercarriage pinging with pebbles, the axels groaning at each pothole. The air was torrid and dry. Bugs struck the windshield and splattered into blots as we maneuvered down muddy side lanes.
For my part, I was just glad to be out of the tornado shelter. I did not care where we were going as long as it involved being out of doors and above ground. We drove with all the windows down. We turned the radio up, singing at the top of our lungs. None of the cars we stole had working air-conditioners, but I did not mind. Across the scrubbed golden fields, I could see forever. The sun began each day in the rearview mirror and ended in the front windshield. The sky was silky and pale, pinned to the horizon like a blouse to a clothesline. Patterns of light pulsed across the wheat. Dragonflies tumbled in the windy shock of our wake. Turkey vultures circled overhead, their wings spread but unmoving, riding the currents of air.
Tucker’s wounds were still healing. He steered with his injured hand in his lap, only his healthy one on the wheel. The exact progression of his suffering was scored into his flesh like the paragraphs of a story. I could see everything that happened to him written there: the shrapnel imbedded in the muscle, a fingernail torn off, the satin ribbons where he had been burned.
Yet his mood was good. He relished being on the road. He laughed at my jokes. He offered to let me steer while he worked the pedals. He asked me about my life. I was unaccustomed to being the center of attention this way. At home, Darlene and Jane were always tired, dispirited, or on their phones. I was used to a certain degree of benign neglect, but being with Tucker was something else. His attention was as intense as a spotlight. I found myself preening in the warm glow.
Eventually we began to encounter hills. This was a phenomenon I did not have much experience with. Mercy was a flat town on a flat plain, a coin on a tabletop. I enjoyed the drop in my stomach as we plummeted downward, the swivel of the road bucking over peaks and dipping into dales. I loved the hollows of shade that came with this terrain—pockets of cold shadows between bluffs where the sunlight never fell. Crossing the hills of the Oklahoma panhandle gave me a renewed sense of momentum. When the ground was flat, even when we were barreling along at sixty miles per hour, I often experienced the illusion of stillness. All the landmarks were too far away to move as we did. The distant barns, a thicket of trees by the horizon, a miniaturized silo—they stayed where they were, as fixed and remote as stars. Only when we reached the hills could I perceive in a measurable way that we were getting somewhere. Up one slope and down another. Traveling west.
Sometimes I would glance in the side mirror and fail to recognize myself. My face looked different without the frame of my long hair—somehow naked, a little vulnerable, younger than before. My ears were always visible now. The architecture of my skull was visible too. I was a shorn sheep, a field in spring just beginning to bloom.
Tucker had sacrificed his curly mane as well. After cutting my hair, he had sliced off his own ponytail, then handed the scissors to me. The physical similarities between us were more pronounced now—boxy brows, delicate ears, crooked grins. This was all part of Tucker’s plan. The police would be on the lookout for an adult man (with a ponytail) and his little sister (with long dark hair), so we had altered our appearances like spies in enemy territory.
I was now a boy.
In public, Tucker called me Corey, which was close enough to my own name that I would respond automatically. He did not allow me to wear my rainbow headband or my socks with whales on them. My glittery gel flip-flops and the heart locket from Darlene remained at the bottom of my bag. Instead, I dressed in denim shorts and tank tops. I wore my overalls, sometimes without a shirt underneath, my nipples discreetly visible. (I did not have boys’ underwear, of course. My panties were purple or polka dotted or decorated with flowers, which brought me comfort, a private talisman of my former identity.) Tucker said I was young enough that my face was not yet recognizably gendered. I spent a lot of time looking in the side mirror of whatever vehicle we were using, wondering whether this was true. I examined my sturdy forehead, my frank brown eyes, my nubble of a chin. I practiced walking like a boy. I practiced spitting. I practiced sitting like Tucker in the car, my arm slung carelessly on the window frame, legs splayed, jaw lifted.
He was cautious about stopping for food and gas. No big towns. Even in rural areas, he would case each grocery store or pharmacy before going in, checking the vicinity for surveillance cameras or police vehicles.
While shopping, he wore a baseball cap to obscure his face. We never went to restaurants. Tucker did not want to spend that long in a crowd, imprinting our presence on the waitress’s memory. Instead, we kept a cooler on the back seat stocked with cheese sticks and Coke. We lived on peanut butter and jelly. (Tucker was a vegetarian, and by default, I was now a vegetarian too.) Whenever we stopped for gas, he would let me stretch my legs, moseying into the grass to pick dandelions and chase butterflies. He kept his chitchat with the clerk to a minimum. He paid cash for everything. When he was done, he would shout: “Corey, get your butt back here!” I would turn at the first syllable of my new name and startle at the second. I would jog to him, running like a boy. We would pull away in the sweltering July breeze, never to be seen again. Tucker told me that we needed to vanish. We were vanishing all the time.
Now and then, I wondered whether I was disappearing in a different way too. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a boy, tanned beneath a cowboy hat, dressed in overalls, dirty around the neck, barefoot, smelling of sweat and travel. When Tucker and I walked into a convenience store, the clerk saw two brothers on the road together, both watchful and lanky, communicating in grunts and nods, similar in gait and bone structure, sharing an unmistakable ease. Cora had become an unspoken name, a girl hidden in plain sight, a memory.
At night, Tucker and I slept in the car. We slept on the ground. We slept in a moldy tent we found, the nylon patterned with lacy mosaics of water damage. Night by night, we slept wherever the mood struck us. We did not have blankets or pillows, and we did not need them—July was warm enough. I dozed sitting up in the passenger’s seat with Tucker behind the wheel, our car parked in the hollow of a cornfield. I napped on the forest floor with Tucker right next to me, the wind brushing my cheek, my ears ringing with bird calls. I loved the fact that the whole world was our bed.
In the manner of the very young, I was already adapting to my new life. There is something refractive about how children perceive time. A few weeks with Tucker felt like years. I could scarcely remember what things had been like before he had uprooted me from No. 43. Once upon a time, I lived in a house with my father and three siblings. Until recently, I lived in a trailer with my sisters. For a brief, dreadful interval, I stayed in a tornado shelter. Now I lived in a series of stolen cars with my brother. I ate from a cooler and slept in fields. I spent my days on the road, my nights in the open. That was the way things were.
