by Andrew Smith
And Robby said, “I’m trying to learn how to fly a jet. There’s a really sweet Citation sitting in the hangar next to my Malibu.”
My father told him, “I will never get into a jet airplane with you, Rob. Never.”
But my dad did not say “never” the same way my mom did that day when I learned to drive. When my dad said that, he had those before eyes, the kind that straddled time and brought him back to when he and Robby were boys my age.
“I would get into a jet airplane with you, Rob,” I said.
And Robby put his arm on my shoulders and said, “You’re my man, Arek.”
So I told Mel all about Robby’s airplane, and how we were going to drive around the outskirts of the place called Waterloo until we found where all the airplanes were kept.
“You’re not thinking about trying to fly one, are you?” she asked.
“Mel. I can barely drive this van we’re in. And let me apologize now for whatever crashing takes place in our future. But I saw all the books Robby had to study in order to fly an airplane, and I could never do what your brother does.”
A Walmart Is a Place of Spirits
My father was wrong about something.
There is no such thing as the end of the world. The world can’t end; it can only change, and change, and change, without end.
That’s what happened to us. Change. It’s what brought us to, and kept us in, the hole.
I had always loved looking at the books about history we kept in the library, particularly ones with photographs. The photographs showed things I had never seen—city streets crowded with automobiles, sidewalks packed full with every color, shape, size, age, and style of human being, all dressed in outside-the-hole outfits.
But there were no people here. There was only empty silence, and square buildings made of stone, some with windows, and many with vacant black rectangles framed with teeth of glass.
It rained all day. It was Mel who figured out that there were mechanical things on the windshield of the van that could be turned on and would swipe away the rain, which was fortunate for us because I couldn’t see very well and nearly did crash the van, as I’d warned her I might do.
“Later, let’s look around in here and see if we can find an instruction book for the van,” I said. “I don’t think I’m nearly smart enough to put everything on this machine together.”
We did not find Robby’s airfield that day, and it was getting late.
“We’re going to need to find some gas tomorrow,” I said.
I stopped the van in front of a long, flat-fronted building with white letters that spelled out WALMART above the doors, which were for the most part empty frames of aluminum. Some of the doors still had pieces of glass in them. There were a dozen or so cars and trucks scattered around the flat, blacktopped lot in front of the building, and here and there small trees sprang up where the surface had crumbled apart. The cars and trucks all sat low to the ground on tires that had long since gone flat.
I took a deep breath. I was scared.
There could be things out there.
I tried to see inside the dark cavern of the Walmart but could not make out any shapes or movement.
And I thought about the time Robby had brought down the two lightning bugs in a jar for me to see. We took them back up the ladder, and I watched from the hatch while Robby let them go into that summer night. The ghosts of Johnny and Ingrid, as Robby called them, obviously did not want to remain inside the jar.
On the other hand, I suppose when you’ve lived inside a jar for your entire life, getting out of it—as desirable as that may seem from the inside—can be overwhelming and complicated. I’m sure all those people in the lifeboats and in the sea in Max Beckmann’s painting would have been very happy to get back inside their little holes in the Titanic.
The world, with all its color and sound, was wild and powerful.
I wondered if cicadas, upon emerging to the surface, ever asked themselves, What if I’m wrong?
“Let’s go inside and see what we can find,” I said.
“Is this where the airplanes are?” Mel asked.
“No. I think it’s something else.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Well.” I thought about it for a moment.
I listened to the tick tick tick of the rain.
I said, “A Walmart is a place of spirits. A place where people who had lost things in war would come to look for them. That’s why they had to be so big. Humans, my dad explained, were the most inhuman creatures on the planet. So the people who had lost things, like their homes or family or people they were in love with, they could all come to the Walmart, and here they would be able to talk to the spirits of those things and the spirits of the people they lost. Because most humans lived in a natural state of loneliness, my father told me, and they missed those things that had been unfairly taken from them. Johnny and Ingrid, and Adam and Eve, too, spent a lot of time here in Walmart, because they had all been very old, and, as a result, had lived through many times of war, and had suffered tremendous losses.”
Mel sat facing me, her legs crossed on the passenger seat. I liked the way she always seemed to be so comfortable. And I liked telling stories to her.
Mel always believed me.
She said, “Losing someone you’re in love with would be very sad.”
“It is very sad. But it used to happen all the time. Like I said, that’s why Walmart had to be so big. There was a lot of that nonsense in the world before the hole.”
And, as always, Mel asked, “Is that true?”
All stories are true the moment they are told.
I bit my lip and looked past her, at the doors of the Walmart. “It is totally true, Mel. At least it will be true until we go inside, I think.”
“Oh. Are you scared?”
“Of course not.” I had never lied to Mel when we were in the hole.
Outside of the hole, I was becoming a fucking liar.
I added, “But let’s bring the guns. You know, just in case.”
“Yeah,” Mel said. “Just in case.”
Leaving Miss Sour Eye, Entering Are Can Sass
“I wonder what happens when we drive ourselves through that big open mouth, Olive. Ha-ha!”
The ambulance had broken down a week before. Breakfast and Olive had spent days trying to find a car that worked. Most cars did not.
So they walked. The houses still standing along the highway had been built far apart, and most of them were swallowed up by the jungle of vines and trees that had overtaken southern Missouri in the last nearly two decades.
And there had been tornados, too.
Breakfast and Olive slept where they could—in an abandoned gas station one night, a collapsing barn the next, then a rotting riverfront cottage, even a rusted locomotive that said MISSOURI & NORTHERN ARKANSAS down its side—until Breakfast finally managed to find a septic-pumping truck that he could get running.
He did not know what STATE LINE SEPTIC SERVICE meant. Breakfast hoped the big bean-shaped tank behind the cab of the truck was filled with gas.
It was not filled with gas, he would later find out.
They had not seen any of the Unstoppable Soldiers since the one Breakfast had spotted having sex with a John Deere tractor’s front grille outside a mobile homes sales yard. But they were out there, Breakfast thought. They were always out there.
And it was hot now too.
So Breakfast, being the wild little boy he almost constantly claimed to be, stopped wearing clothes altogether.
The big open mouth Breakfast was about to drive his septic-pumping truck through was actually a concrete arch that spanned the roadway. At the very top of the arch, in all capital letters, was the phrase that Breakfast read aloud to Olive. He was pretty sure that Olive, who could not talk, also could not read.
But how can you be certain when someone doesn’t ever talk? Breakfast thought.
The boy said, “Entering Arkansas.”<
br />
Olive nodded excitedly.
Breakfast had pronounced it are-can-sass, having never in his life heard such things as the names of states in spoken language. As a result, Missouri had always been miss-sour-eye to Breakfast, who, all things considered, was pretty smart for a just-turned-twelve-year-old, post-public-education, new-human, naked, non-American boy.
“And damn if I’m not hungry, Olive,” he said.
Olive bounced approvingly in her seat in the septic-pumping truck next to Breakfast. Olive was hungry too.
“And you know what else I am, Olive?” Breakfast asked.
Of course Olive knew what Breakfast was, but the naked kid at the wheel said it anyway: “Rich and wild, Olive. Rich and wild!”
He pulled the truck into a gravel drive that led down a sloping bank to a creek. The septic truck whined and scraped as it snapped saplings and branches that nearly obscured the track. Breakfast laughed and scratched his balls. They climbed down from the cab of the pumper truck, and Breakfast went for a swim and washed the filth from his skin and hair, while Olive watched from the shore. Olive did not like to swim, but she’d step slowly into the creek and cup her little hands and sip the cool water that pooled in her palms.
Breakfast was good at catching crawdads. He’d learned early on how to tip rocks in the shallows away from him and let the creatures back into his fingers, so he could grab their tails without getting pinched too much. It wasn’t a perfect method, and he did get pinched once in a while, but in the long run it was worth it. He loved to eat the things. Cooked or raw, it didn’t matter to Breakfast, who was wild, anyway.
His hair, knotted in thick ropey locks, mopped over his shoulders. He would have to cut it all off again soon, he thought.
“Shit! Motherfucker!”
Breakfast flailed his right hand wildly. A big male crawdad had clamped its pincer on the chubby underside of Breakfast’s index finger. Olive was entertained by this. She waved and smiled at the boy in the creek.
Breakfast filled a small plastic bucket with crawdads, and two bluegills as well. He was very good at catching fish with his bare hands, but then again, Breakfast was completely wild. Sometimes he would cook their food, but he preferred eating fish raw. Olive gathered dandelion greens from near the highway. They ate until they were full, and Breakfast stretched out on a sunny place in the dirt and fell asleep. Olive lay down next to the boy and put her head on his chest and her hand on his belly.
Olive dreamed about Breakfast, and Breakfast dreamed about money and police cars.
In the new world, sounds like the noise of machinery struck the ears of new humans with the subtlety of an avalanche.
Breakfast opened his eyes and shot up to a sitting position. Olive got to her feet.
An airplane was coming from the north.
Breakfast strained to hear if it was getting closer or receding away from them in the sky. The growl of the engine was getting louder.
“Motherfucker!” Breakfast jumped up.
There was no way the man in the sky would see him and Olive there in all those trees by the creek.
“Come on, Olive! Hurry!”
Breakfast pulled Olive’s hand, and the two scrambled up into the cab of the septic-pumping truck. Breakfast smashed and tore the truck back up the narrow gravel drive and out onto the highway, blasting the horn while he drove. He could not hear the plane, but the truck was far too loud, anyway. He slammed the brakes and parked the truck in the middle of the highway; then Breakfast and Olive climbed up onto the roof of the cab.
Breakfast saw the plane. It was only about three hundred feet up, coming directly toward them. The wild naked boy waved his arms and jumped up and down, over and over, on the roof of the truck.
Olive did too.
And Breakfast shouted, “Motherfucker! I have money! Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”
The plane kept coming closer and closer.
The Library for Vegetables and Clothes
As it turned out, Walmart was not a spiritual center.
It was a terrible mess, though, and it was hard for us to see what was inside because the only windows were up front. Mel wanted to go back to the motorhome to get a candle, but I was too scared to let her go alone. So we both went.
“I don’t think this is a place of spirits,” Mel said.
“Maybe depressed and dirty spirits.”
Near the front of the Walmart were rows of walls that almost looked like library shelves, only empty ones. The shelves had little signs on them, with numbers, labeled with the names of fruits and vegetables, most of which I had never seen in my life. Not that I was seeing them now, either.
The floor was covered in a slippery green muck that was dotted with countless thousands of little animal tracks that looked like this:
There were no human tracks, with shoes or otherwise, anywhere.
Behind the library for vegetables were large open areas with signs suspended from the ceiling: WOMEN, MEN, SHOES, and so on. Clothes hung from metal rods or were folded, stacked on more library shelves. Many of them had been torn apart, like the nests in the hole our chickens lived in, and many more had become part of the mulched debris-muck on the floor, but there were still plenty of things that had not been ruined, and even packages of socks and underwear that were sealed inside plastic bags.
“Look at all this!” Mel said.
It was an amazing find.
How many more places like this were out here, out of the hole?
No wonder Dad and Robby kept coming out here. I wished they had taken me; I wished they had been allowed to take me.
I said, “It’s time for you to break the rules and get rid of the uniform of the hole.”
I wanted to break every rule there ever was with Mel.
And then I felt stupid and embarrassed, because I realized how badly I wanted to watch Mel undress in front of me. It was almost as though I could feel my eyes grow larger, just so they could take in every detail of her shedding her clothes—like some magnificent painting, a before-the-hole Max Beckmann. And I had seen Mel undress hundreds—thousands—of times, but now that we were here, out of the hole, alone with no rules, things were immeasurably different. Now there was a tightness in my chest, and I had to reach down and adjust myself, trying to stop my penis from doing what it wouldn’t stop doing when I thought about Mel taking off her clothes.
Mel didn’t notice.
I held the candle, and Mel foraged for new clothes.
It ended up being almost like Christmas, but without the rules and the dead tree, and the inevitable anger and disappointment that Wendy’s holiday always inflicted on the hole. We did not take too much, and we found all the right things to dress Mel up like a real dynamo Iowa girl, as Robby would have called her.
When it came time for her to get into the new long underwear we found in the men’s section, I put the candle down and turned away because I didn’t want Mel to feel embarrassed, or anything else a before-the-hole girl might feel when she’s naked in a Walmart with a boy.
But I really wanted to watch her.
Maybe Walmart really was a place of spirits, and the spirit of Wendy was making me feel guilty and ashamed, that I needed to segregate my feelings and my body away from Mel’s.
“What are you doing?” Mel asked.
I said, “Turning around.”
“Why?”
“Um. I don’t know. I think a spirit was talking to me.”
“Stop being silly, Arek. You’re acting weird.”
“I know I am acting weird. Ever since I left the hole, I feel like something’s happening to me. Don’t you feel it?”
“No,” Mel said. “Okay. I’m dressed. You don’t have to turn your back to me anymore.”
I turned around as Mel fastened the final button just below her neck. I gulped. I had never seen anything so beautiful as Amelie Sing Brees in a trashed-out Walmart, standing there in front of me in a set of white size-small men’s long underwear. In the dim light thrown
out by our candle, she looked like a sculpture. If I were back in the hole, I would have made some excuse so I could get away to somewhere private and be alone. But being out here with Mel, I was never going to get to do that, and realizing this made my stomach hurt.
I wished my dads were here so I could ask them about what was happening to me, and if it was ever going to stop. I did ask them about masturbating—if it was bad, on account of things Wendy had told me—and my dad laughed and said masturbating was the opposite of bad.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Mel said. “Your eyes look like fish eyes.”
“Oh. I don’t know. I apologize.”
“Weird.”
We found Mel a hunter’s cap like mine and some boots that left interesting tracks in the slimy mud all over the floor. Then we took sheets and blankets for Mel’s little bed, and I found a plastic hand-operated well pump in an area where there were lots of tools and metal things that I had no idea what function they might possibly have served.
I thought the hand pump would be good when we found places with gas.
I’d seen Dad and Robby use one before on a big tanker truck they kept in the field of the three holes, behind my mother’s and Wendy’s ancient, collapsing house.
I took three movie discs that had colorful pictures on their covers, assuming they would be happy shows to watch. And we picked up some toothbrushes sealed inside tiny plastic coffins, and razors, even though I hadn’t started shaving yet, except for the couple of times I played at it with Dad or Robby. Mel took a box of tampons. She told me it felt like she was getting her period. I felt bad for her. It wasn’t a secret or anything. Like I said, we grew up like dang hippies—naked half the time, uninhibited. Dad and Wendy told me everything they knew about sex when I was maybe five years old. Dad said he didn’t want to be like his father —all hung up and embarrassed about things—so it was no big deal, no secret. What Dad and Wendy didn’t tell me about sex, Robby, my other father, did.
