by Andrew Smith
Dad laughed.
Then Mom looked at me for a long time, wordlessly asking the same question of me.
I knew that was what she’d been thinking—that maybe all three of us boys had gotten drunk together that day, away from the hole.
So I just shook my head and said, “I drove.”
And then I lifted my bucket slightly and added, “Look. Fish.”
My mother was very, very angry at us.
Listen, I won’t say much more about that night except to say that it reminded me of a Max-Beckmann-after-the-hole painting.
The fish dinner was delicious. Most of our food came from jars—preserved meats and vegetables from the greenhouse the boys had constructed above the hole and that Louis worked on without end, year after year.
It made me proud that I had brought something so satisfying back to the hole.
Mel told me she thought I was very brave and strong, and that she loved the fish, and also my hat, which I wore, along with my new red long underwear—and nothing else—at our dinner table.
Wendy frowned and told me I should put on clothes.
My mother and father argued after dinner. She told him she would never allow me to leave the hole with him and Robby again. Never.
Never.
Then she slapped my father.
Outside of movies, which I knew were all pretend, I had never seen anyone hit another human being in my life. I started to cry. Robby started to cry too.
I didn’t want to see anything else.
I went to Dad’s room and climbed into bed. In a minute Dad came in too. He did not turn on the light.
Dad got into my bed next to me and put his arm around me and told me he was sorry.
I was still crying.
I put my face on his chest and listened to his heart trying to tell me a wordless apology, without end, for everything that wasn’t Dad’s fault. I thought about The Sinking of the Titanic, and how similar we all were to those people in the small, crowded boats and in the raging, cold ocean that swirled, without end, in every imaginable shade of blue in that beautiful painting.
And I said, “The most beautiful prison is still just a prison.”
Crazy People Should Never Be Allowed to Give Things Names
I never left the hole again like that until I was sixteen years old. Mother would not tolerate it.
But Dad and Robby had gone away, and they did not come back.
I’d been thinking about this moment since the day Robby and Dad took me ice fishing at Clear Lake. In truth, I will always believe they intended to come back to the hole, but something had happened to prevent their return, because my two fathers would never leave me like that.
On the other hand, I also realized that the trip we’d taken when I was thirteen years old, when they’d taught me to drive, and how to fish, and how to kill an Unstoppable Soldier, and maybe even what it looks like when two people love each other—I realized there was more to it than that, that it was some sort of preparatory test for me, so they could see if one day I would be able to look after the others in the hole.
I selfishly did not want to look after the others in the hole. As with Wendy’s rules, I resented having no say in the forced imposition of growing up.
Although I could drive a car and fish and even kill an Unstoppable Soldier if I needed to do these things, I also hated myself for my inability to put into words that I had fallen in love with Amelie Sing Brees.
So I needed to run away from the hole.
I needed to find my father.
It was in the third week that Robby and Dad had been away that Mel and I were doing chores together—cleaning the kitchen, which was one of the tasks our Saturday job, according to Wendy, always involved.
Mel and I spoke in near whispers while we worked. My mother, or Wendy, was always just around the corner from us. I believed they were afraid of what had been happening to me.
I was afraid of what had been happening to me.
“I’ve decided that I need to leave,” I said.
Mel had been drying dishes and stacking them on the steel shelves on the wall above the counter. I couldn’t help but think about how we used to take baths together here. I couldn’t stop wondering if Mel thought about it too.
“What do you mean? Leave the kitchen?” Mel asked.
“No. I mean leave the hole. I’m leaving, and I’m going to take that black Mercedes motorhome Dad and Robby brought back.”
Everyone else called the hole Eden. I could never call it that. It was just “the hole.” The guy who created it, who was in some weird way like a great-uncle to me, should never have named the place Eden. But we all knew he’d been insane, anyway.
Crazy people should never be allowed to give things names.
Mel was silent for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice came very softly.
She said, “Why would you do that?”
“I have to find my father. And your brother, too.”
I looked directly at her, but I could tell she was willing herself not to look back at me. She was mad at me or something. Everyone was mad at me, except, maybe, for Louis.
Mel looked like she was talking to the stack of plates in front of her. “You should wait for them. They will come back.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to wait anymore.”
“Your mom and Wendy will tell you no,” Mel said.
“Of course they will. But how can they possibly stop me? They can’t keep me prisoner here,” I said.
Then she looked at me. It was like she was sizing me up, maybe realizing for the first time in her life that at sixteen years old, there really was no way my mother or Wendy—or anyone—could make me do anything I didn’t want to do.
“What will I do if you don’t come back?”
“I’ll come back. I promise.”
Mel turned away from me. She put her hand up to her face. I knew she was starting to cry, and I wanted to hug her so badly. I wanted to take our clothes off and get in the bath together. I wanted to do everything I’d ever dreamed about doing with Mel.
“Arek, what did you do? What did you say to her?”
Wendy, my grandmother, had been standing just inside the passageway to the dining area. She’d been watching me and Mel do our chores.
She was probably getting ready to make a rule about whispering.
I shook my head and said, “I don’t know.”
No Wonder We Came Down Here
Max Beckmann was a degenerate.
I mean, that was what they called him after the hole he went through.
“They” were the Nazis, and the hole Max Beckmann went through was called World War I.
That night, after I told Mel I was going to leave, I sat in the library alone and stared at my father’s drawings and the Max Beckmann paintings he’d brought down into our hole. I was trying to make up my mind about saying good-bye to Mel. Although I’d made a promise to her, I honestly did not know if I would come back.
I wanted to see things. I wanted to put my feet into a river. I wanted to pick leaves from a tree. I wanted to throw a rock at a window.
And I’d get caught if I went to Mel’s room to say all this to her.
The other Max Beckmann painting in our library came from a place called Germany, which is on the other side of the world from our hole. My father never told me how it came to be here, and I never asked him. I was always afraid of the painting, and now, as I sat in our library among all our useless books and artwork and artifacts from before the hole, our Breakfast Papers, while I thought about the clothes I would wear in making my escape and what I would steal before leaving, I found myself staring at the Beckmann painting to the point that it almost began to move, to speak to me.
It’s a horrifying image.
The painting, I think, shows a family that has been living inside a hole, just like us.
Where do I begin?
Where do I begin? With the choking man? The family’s hole has bee
n invaded by three strangers. One of them, his head bandaged, casually smoking a pipe, is breaking the father’s arm, while a second man twists a knotted sheet around the father’s neck and hangs him from a rafter. The woman—the mother—may be dead. Her hands are tied to some kind of post, and she has apparently been raped. There’s another woman who is tied upside down. You can only see her legs and a portion of her dress, which is red. And there’s a little boy—their son—wrapped in the folds of the third intruder’s cloak. He is being abducted. The third man is going to do something terrible to the little boy, who looks on at the suffering of his parents with an odd, worried smile. Music is playing. There’s a phonograph on the floor beneath the table where the father is being tortured. And behind it all is a woman in a red coat, silently watching the unfolding of the scene, like the rule giver. She’s the Wendy of Max Beckmann’s hole. At least, that’s what I thought.
So they called Max Beckmann a degenerate, and he had to leave Germany before the Second World War. He must have been very, very smart, and also lucky.
One time, my father, staring at Max Beckmann’s after-the-hole painting, said this to me: “This is exactly what the world was like, before we came here, Arek.”
I sat there in the library that night.
I could almost hear my father’s voice.
I could almost hear the music from the phonograph in Max Beckmann’s painting.
I could almost hear the waves on the sea as the Titanic was being swallowed whole.
I thought this was exactly what my world was like now.
And I always thought, no wonder we came down here.
A Sure Sign of Spring
Winter tightened its fist around April and wouldn’t let go.
Breakfast and Olive headed south, looking for somewhere warmer than St. Louis.
The boy drove a white Missouri State Highway Patrol car south to a place called Cape Girardeau, where it stopped working in the middle of Independence Street, next to an awful-looking building called Rush Hudson Limbaugh Sr. US Courthouse.
“I wonder if they keep money in there,” Breakfast said.
Olive never talked.
That day, Breakfast could feel it was finally getting warmer. The Unstoppable Soldiers would soon be out in numbers.
Driving down from St. Louis, Breakfast and Olive had seen the empty husks of at least a dozen of the monsters who’d died from the cold, and in the woods along the highway outside a place called Perryville, they saw a living one, tall and green, its head pivoting as it watched the highway patrol car speed past it.
Breakfast liked police cars. Police cars went fast, and their flashing lights and sirens made him and Olive very happy.
They kept limited belongings in a black canvas duffel bag Breakfast stowed in the backseat of the patrol car—mostly Breakfast’s horde of currency, a few articles of clothing, some food, a siphon hose for gasoline, a knife, and ammunition for the rifle the boy constantly carried.
The rifle was a Bushmaster AR-15 with a sixteen-inch barrel. The rifle’s primary use was for hunting deer and rabbits, if they were big enough to withstand obliteration from the impact of the 3,200-foot-per-second rounds fired from the gun.
The weapon was useless against Unstoppable Soldiers, but that didn’t matter as long as Breakfast was with Olive. Unstoppable Soldiers tripped over their own spindly legs trying to run away from her. Breakfast had even seen one leap from a bridge into the Meramec River just trying to get away from Olive.
Unstoppable Soldiers do not swim.
Olive and Breakfast watched the monster flutter and drown as the river carried him away.
“Ha! Damn! Look at that dumb bug, wouldja? I hope that doesn’t hurt your feelings or nothing,” Breakfast said. “Because I like you just fine, Olive.”
Olive patted the back of Breakfast’s hand.
The Unstoppable Soldier gurgled and gagged.
Breakfast scratched his balls and spit into the river.
Sitting behind the wheel of the patrol car in Cape Girardeau, Breakfast was barefoot and shirtless. Soon enough, when the weather became hot and humid, Breakfast would abandon clothing altogether. He was what some people would have called a New Human. He was the manifestation of the prediction men of science had made for what would become of any survivors after the plague they’d started from Iowa corn. Breakfast was born nearly five years into the event—the onslaught of the Unstoppable Soldiers—and therefore lacked any notion of what the old humans would have practiced as social conventions, like wearing clothes, for example.
Nothing was social or conventional anymore, and Breakfast, at twelve years old, was completely wild.
He got out of the car and peed on its front wheel.
“Come on, Olive. Let’s get us a new car.”
Olive slid across the front seat and climbed out on Breakfast’s side.
“Did I ever tell you how wild I am? Ha! Maybe a thousand times, right? And rich! We’re rich, Olive! We don’t have a care in the world, as long as we stick together.”
Olive nodded and held Breakfast’s hand.
The boy scrawled a message on a stock certificate he’d found inside a kitchen cupboard in a collapsing house in Cahokia.
The stock had been issued in 1969 by Pan American World Airways, Incorporated. Breakfast took it because, like money, the stock certificate looked like something people would give you things for. If there were things to give. If there were people, aside from the men he had seen flying above him in the machine with wings.
There must be others, Breakfast thought. He would find them.
The certificate was stamped with a value of nineteen shares.
On the stock was a picture of a large eagle. The eagle perched on a branch that sat balanced on the north poles of two hemispheric maps of the world. On the outside of the two half worlds crouched naked men—one on the left holding a torch and one on the right lifting a staff with a snake coiled around it. The men were smiling, even the one on the right, who seemed to be on the brink of being eaten by the eagle, which was the same size as the naked guys holding things. Or maybe the eagle wanted the naked man’s snake.
Breakfast liked snakes.
Breakfast used a red crayon to write his message on the Pan American World Airways, Incorporated stock certificate. The message said this:
breakfast and olive have lots of money more than this here and we are going south still looking for you anywhere you are are you looking for us if so go south because we are taking our money and going that way to i will leave the light on the car so you will look here and also we are going someplace warm but you dont need worry about the monsters since there scared of olive and run off whenever they see her also i am only twelve years old
yours truly breakfast
Breakfast scratched his balls and picked his nose. He left the patrol car’s emergency lights flashing and tucked the stock certificate beneath the vehicle’s windshield wiper.
“Come on, Olive. Well, keep your eye out for the monsters. It’s getting warmer, girl. Warmer and warmer. Wild! We’re wild as they come!”
Breakfast and Olive found a nice new red-and-white van that said CAPE COUNTY PRIVATE AMBULANCE on its sides.
Breakfast didn’t really know what ambulances were used for, or police cars for that matter, but he especially liked the ambulance because it was big and fast, had lights and a siren, and even had a bed in the back where he and Olive could sleep if they needed to.
The ambulance was perfect for them, Breakfast thought.
Speeding down Interstate 55 with the ambulance’s siren wailing and lights blazing, in the flat, green, middle of nowhere, Breakfast and Olive passed a chain-link-fenced lot with a peeling plywood sign that said:
KEMPLE MOBILE HOME SALES
“Wouldja look at that! Ha-ha!” Breakfast said.
Outside the lot, in waist-high grass that had long since gone as wild as Breakfast, sat a shiny green John Deere tractor with brilliant yellow wheels. And bent over the to
p of the front end of the tractor, his spiny arms tightly clamped to the rising air stack and spark arrester, was a six-foot-tall, man-eating Unstoppable Soldier, pumping his abdomen in wild thrusts against the slots on the John Deere’s grille while his triangular head rocked from side to side and his useless wings buzzed like static electricity.
Breakfast slowed the ambulance, and then stopped so they could watch.
“I guess that’s a sure sign of spring, right, Olive? Ha-ha! Dang, that buck sure is making a mess all over those front tires, though! Ha-ha-ha!”
Breakfast scratched his balls and spit on the floorboard between his knees. He slapped the steering wheel, and laughed and laughed.
A Chance Encounter with Bigfoot
I had already decided which vehicle I was going to take.
I had also decided to try my best not to crash it.
The thing was a customized Mercedes military vehicle that had an entire living space built inside. It was four-wheel drive, so it could go almost anywhere, and all black, and the windows were so dark you couldn’t see inside it at all. The machine was almost like a movable hole because it had everything: a bed, a shower, a toilet (which I decided to avoid using if I could), a small kitchen, and two televisions that played movies on discs. When Robby and Dad brought the Mercedes home to our hole, they stocked it up with every imaginable item it might need, even liquor, which is something I had never tried.
In truth, being alone and out of the hole felt terrifying.
Inside the hole, everything is cut up by walls and floors and ceilings. Inside the hole, there is a constant drone—the mechanics of the hole, the mechanics of our little society’s interactions. But out here, everything goes on without end, and sounds peak and wane, a rising ocean under its own control. Light and dark escape all command.
I was so alone.
So, as I drove away from our field that had three holes in it—the one called Eden, and the other two for Johnny and Ingrid—I had to keep telling myself out loud to be brave, not to turn back. It was a struggle, without end. A big part of me wanted to turn around and go back to the hole. But if I did that, I knew I would never again be able to leave.
