by Andrew Smith
Other than that, I had no idea what the movie was about. I only hoped that it was about birds, which were nice, as opposed to the terrifying film about Bigfoot that I’d watched on my first night.
I was also happy that I had stopped obsessing about Mel in the shower. At least I’d stopped thinking about her until I heard the water shut off behind the door.
I turned on the television and willed myself not to be staring at the door when she opened it.
“What are you watching?” Mel asked.
You, I wanted to say; I am watching you.
You are home to me.
“A movie about birds.”
Mel was wearing the white long underwear we’d taken. I wanted to tell her it looked good on her, but I couldn’t. I wanted to ask her where home was, but those words would never come.
“Oh. Nice. Can I sit down next to you?”
I wondered if she could see my heart beating. The pulse in my neck was so loud inside my head that I almost couldn’t hear her.
“Sure.”
I scooted over, and Mel sat down beside me. I gave her a pillow without looking directly at her face. If I looked at her, I was certain Mel would ask me why I was acting so stupid, and I didn’t have any answers, only questions and words I was too afraid to make into truth.
I said, “If you’re cold, you can get under the sleeping bag.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
Mel pulled back the top of the sleeping bag and then slid into bed next to me. When she did, her foot brushed down along the outside of my leg. My pulse got even louder. My penis was so stiff it hurt, but I didn’t want to touch it. I felt embarrassed and dumb, like a before-the-hole boy, and I couldn’t move. I desperately hoped, from sheer terror, that I would not end up having a wet dream just because Mel had gotten under the covers to watch a fucking movie about birds with me.
Mel said, “This is fun, Arek. And thank you for dancing with me today.”
I attempted to swallow the knot in my throat. I tried to think about anything that wasn’t about Mel and me in bed together and having a goddamned wet dream.
“Um. Well. We broke the rule about Hawaiian-style clothes.”
The movie came on.
The Battle of Hampton Roads
Breakfast did not calm down for a long time.
He was very mad about being covered in sixteen-year-old piss and shit.
It turned out the reason people as tall as Breakfast were not allowed to ride the Battle of Hampton Roads Thrill Ride! was that the attraction included actual cannon balls fired from two metal contraptions—ships on opposite sides of the lake. The riders on the Battle of Hampton Roads Thrill Ride! sat in low boats pulled along an underwater track, while each ship fired cannon balls that sailed directly over the unprotected heads of the fortunately diminutive passengers, missing their Tennessean skulls by mere inches.
There were no guns firing now, no ships under steam, just an algae-clogged, lukewarm, man-made pond filled with catfish, pollywogs, and leeches, along with a thrashing and naked little boy, wriggling and twisting like a hooked alligator, scrubbing and scratching, wringing his hands in the knotted locks of his wild hair, swearing and spitting as he attempted to rid himself of the filth that came from the pumper truck.
And beside the swampy lake stood a small wooden shack with a sign across its porch that said:
BALL’S BLUFF BOILED PEANUTS
“Fuck! Motherfucker!” Breakfast scrubbed and scrubbed. He spit. He swished green soupy water in and out of his mouth and nostrils. He poked the tips of his fingers into his ears and rotated them. Breakfast’s hair became matted with thick clumps of algae.
And beside the sagging front porch of the boiled-peanuts stand, a starving and emaciated Unstoppable Soldier pivoted its head and rubbed its folded spiked arms like twin violin bows, aroused by the motion of a human being not thirty yards away in the shallow dirty lake.
Unstoppable Soldiers, although they could sometimes digest other things, could not survive without human meat. Unstoppable Soldiers only want to eat one thing—that is, when they’re not eating other Unstoppable Soldiers they’re engaged in sexual intercourse with—and that one thing, like a receptive mate, was getting harder and harder to find. But here was one now, writhing and twitching deliciously in the water, and the Unstoppable Soldier perched beside Ball’s Bluff Boiled Peanuts, mesmerized by the twelve-year-old boy in the pond, salivating and hissing, nearly dead from starvation.
Breakfast finally calmed down.
When the boy stood up straight, the water in the lake only came up to the middle of his chest.
Breakfast wiped his face in his palms and blew chunks of snot from each nostril.
He spit again.
He screamed, “I hate you, motherfucker shit truck!”
And saying that, Breakfast realized he could not remember where the shit truck was, or what might have happened to Olive. He tried to think if he’d seen any cars when he was running, but it was all a blur that escaped his frazzled memory. Breakfast turned around, at last taking in all the strangeness of Rebel Land.
“Wild!”
When Breakfast wiped the murk away from his eyes, he saw what looked like a fantasy image of twisting, looping train tracks, red sky baskets hanging from overhead cables with stars painted inside blue Xs, and a big building called DOC SAWBONES’ FIELD AMPUTATION HOUSE OF HORRORS!
The building was adorned with plastic arms and legs with waxy fake blood at their severed ends.
“Hoo-boy! This place is as wild as me!”
And behind the boy, the hungry giant mantis, drooling and pumping its glistening, jagged mandibular structures in and out, open and shut, crept closer and closer to the shore.
Breakfast poked his index fingers into his mouth and whistled.
When he was especially loud, Breakfast could kill small mammals with the pitch of his whistling.
“Olive! Hey! Olive!”
Breakfast whistled again, louder.
Unstoppable Soldiers are mostly deaf. They have just one tiny ear opening, and their hearing is tuned only to very high frequencies. The Unstoppable Soldier quietly stalking Breakfast at the edge of the pond heard the boy’s whistle and froze. It tilted its enormous triangular head, and then dipped its razor-barbed front arms into the water, reaching down to probe for the bottom. Unstoppable Soldiers also hate bodies of water, but this one was moments away from death by starvation and needed to eat Breakfast.
“Olive!”
When the creature jumped into the murky lake, Breakfast, thinking the motion he’d caught at the edge of his field of vision was Olive, spun around to see what was there.
The thing was in the lake, awkwardly wading toward the boy, and it was very, very hungry.
“Motherfucker! Olive!” Breakfast screamed.
The Unstoppable Soldier pushed forward, scrabbling and slipping on the goo-covered concrete bottom of the pond. As it came at Breakfast, it created a wake that rippled away in a V. It gathered a thick belt of green algae skirting its midsection.
“OLIVE!”
Breakfast gulped air and dove beneath the surface of the lake. He kicked off the bottom and swam as fast as he could away from the massive predator just as the Unstoppable Soldier’s spike-clawed arms speared down at the spot where the boy had been standing.
The monster came up waving arms draped with ropes of mossy green algae. It thrashed and stabbed into the water again and again, but the boy was gone. The Unstoppable Soldier slashed and raked his spiked arms over and over at the surface of the water, insane with hunger.
Breakfast’s chest pounded. Stroking his way along the lake bottom, blinded by the pale foamy green of the Battle of Hampton Roads Thrill Ride’s fake river channel, he held his breath until he began to feel weak and dizzy.
Breakfast came to the surface on the other side of a flat-topped metal structure that said MONITOR along its side. He kept his head low, huffing as much air as he could and listening for the thing t
hat was hunting him on the other side of the ship.
Something moved on the shore in front of Breakfast. The boy got ready to go back under again. Breakfast was a good swimmer and fighter, and he was not going to just give up and let a goddamned giant bug eat him.
Then he realized he was looking directly at Olive, who waved her arms and grinned at Breakfast.
“Olive!” Breakfast hissed a whisper. He held up his palm, and then hitched his thumb backward in the direction of the monster in the lake. “Go get him, girl!”
Olive focused on the Unstoppable Soldier, who still hadn’t noticed her in his starving, unrelenting hunt for the boy in the water.
Olive chirped and grunted. She waved her arms overhead so the thing would become aware of her movement. The Unstoppable Soldier stopped its frantic spearfishing for the boy in the lake and stood, upright and shaky, on its back legs. The monster’s pinpoint pseudopupils tightened inward and then dilated when its eyes fixed on Olive. It pushed back, trying to get away from her. The giant bug’s carapace opened, and sets of useless wings churned through the stew of algae on the surface of the lake.
Weakened by hunger, and weighed down by the water and muck on the surface, the Unstoppable Soldier gave up and tumbled backward into the lake, fizzling and burbling as it went under. Only the two front arms periscoped above the surface, twitching slightly for a few seconds before locking stiff in the grip of death.
Olive jumped up and down on the shore.
Breakfast clapped and splashed in the water beside the Monitor.
“You are my gem, Olive! A real gem! Yip-hoo! Welcome to Rebel Land, girl!”
Breakfast kicked forward, dipped below the surface, and swam for shore.
Olive was happy to see him.
Breakfast came up, spouting tepid lake water from his mouth and nose. Strands of fluorescent-green algae braided themselves into the boy’s wild dreadlocks.
“I got all that shit off me! Hoo-boy, I never want to relive that experience, Olive!”
The boy braced his hands on the sidewalk that edged the lake and launched himself up out of the water. Olive jumped up and down with excitement and hugged Breakfast as soon as he was on his feet.
“Awww, thank you, girl! I love you, too,” Breakfast said.
Breakfast was spotted all over with leeches. There were dozens and dozens of them, slick and black, attached to the boy’s skin everywhere.
“Well, fuck that!” Breakfast said.
Every leech he plucked left a running trail of Breakfast’s blood, comingling with the lake water and algae that clung to him. Olive had to help pull the parasites off Breakfast. The boy couldn’t even see the places where half of them were.
And Breakfast, streaked with his own watery blood where the leeches had pierced his skin, just shook his head and said, “Wild!”
Olive ate most of the leeches and algae she plucked from the boy.
It took them nearly half an hour, and when they were finished, Olive dipped handfuls of dried grass into the water of the attraction’s fake lake so she could sponge away the blood that had dried to Breakfast’s skin.
“Thank you, Olive. I don’t know what I’d ever do without you,” Breakfast said. “Did you see any police cars or ambulances when you followed me in, Olive?”
Olive shook her head.
Breakfast was very smart. “Well, a place like this would have to have a parking lot somewhere. We just didn’t see it, maybe on account of all the trees and stuff. And I don’t want to, but we’re going to need to go back to the shit truck and get our guns and all my money.”
So Olive took Breakfast’s hand, and the two of them walked out the entrance to the Battle of Hampton Roads Thrill Ride! and past the sign that told tall riders they might die here.
Breakfast looked back one time at the lake and said, “Come on, girl. Wild!”
“Hey, you! Hey, you boy! Stop! Who are you? Where’d you come from?”
Breakfast and Olive turned around.
“Wait! Don’t run off! Wait!”
Someone, waving both arms enthusiastically, had come down the steps that led to Doc Sawbones’ Field Amputation House of Horrors! and was running right toward Breakfast and Olive.
Wild.
This Isn’t How I Thought It Would Be
I thought, If this is what birds do, then maybe we should go back in the hole.
What if I’m wrong about everything?
“Fuck birds,” I said. “I never want to see a fucking bird again as long as I live.”
It turned out that Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was the most horrifying thing I had ever seen. Mel had fallen asleep beside me, and I was so scared that I didn’t have the nerve to turn off the television, partly because I didn’t want Mel to wake up and go to her own bed, but mostly because I kept waiting for someone to come on the screen and tell me the story was all made up—it was all a joke, and none of this was true or could ever happen.
But all stories are true the moment they are told.
What if birds got inside our van?
The film, on the other hand, definitely made me stop thinking about my penis, and how Mel and I were in my bed together, completely alone and outside the limits of any rules, at least until it was over and the screen went blank.
So I lay there for a few minutes, telling myself how the movie was all just made up, that it could not be the truth, that people before the hole would never have lasted with all those birds, and Bigfoot, wolverines, Unstoppable Soldiers, and wars and such. It was all too much to think about, how life before the hole must have been as frighteningly insane as being trapped inside one of Max Beckmann’s most terrifying compositions.
I had to do something, but what if everything I did turned out to be a mistake?
Mel shifted slightly. Her hair was damp, and she smelled sweet, like the soap we had in the shower. I wanted to kiss her so bad. I decided I would—just a nice kiss, the way my dads would kiss me on the cheek or on the forehead when they’d tell me I love you every night before I’d go to sleep.
I could do that. It would be okay.
I leaned my face closer to hers. Mel was so beautiful and smelled so nice.
But I did not kiss her.
Kisses are things that cannot be secret.
Nobody had to tell me that rule.
So, moving as quietly as I could, I lifted the covers and got out of bed, making sure not to wake Mel. I was barefoot and had nothing on under those baggy basketball shorts and the sleeveless shirt with the number 42 on it.
Mel slept so quietly. I could see in her face that she was not worried or afraid of anything. And I thought, if I had anything to do with Mel feeling safe and comfortable, then maybe what I was doing was right.
If I were one of my dads, I suppose at that moment I would have lit a cigarette and gone outside in the quiet. One time, when I was fifteen, I asked my dads if I could have a cigarette with them. We were in the library inside the hole, and both of them had been smoking. My father was reading aloud from an anthology of poems written by a man named Wallace Stevens, his favorite poet.
My question surprised them, I think, because I saw them look at each other with this kind of wordless conversation that considered assent and simultaneously argued the fact that both of them had started smoking—above and before the hole—when they were younger than me. And even though I could have secretly experimented with cigarettes on my own, there was no sneaking in the hole, no secrets or things I hid from anyone, except for maybe my feelings and confusion about what had been happening to my body, and what I thought about Mel.
I think I’d asked them if I could smoke because the smell was something I so strongly associated with my fathers, almost as though the smoke itself became a physical manifestation of their love for me, and for each other, too. So, at that very confusing age of fifteen years, as we sat there in the library and listened to poetry, I asked them, flat out, if they would allow me to have a cigarette with them too.
Dad�
��Austin—didn’t answer. He lay the book faceup on his lap and shook a cigarette out from the pack that was resting on the table between our chairs. I watched as he put a new cigarette into his mouth and then lit it from the coal of the one he’d been smoking.
He handed the cigarette to me.
I knew how to do it. I held my hand up in a gesture of stop when he began explaining the method for smoking a cigarette.
I said, “I’ve seen how to do it for fifteen years, Dad.”
And Robby, my other dad, said, “What else have you seen how to do for fifteen years?”
I thought about it. I held the cigarette in front of my nose and stared at the glowing orange eye at its tip, looking at the sea and the boats and the humanity in Max Beckmann’s painting.
“I’ve seen how to make pancakes, how to fish, and how to drive a car, although, admittedly, I’m not very good at it. I’ve seen how people really love each other, and I’ve also seen how sometimes people can hold their anger inside and keep it trapped in a sealed jar like insects.”
“You should be a poet,” Dad—Austin—said.
I put the cigarette in my lips. I sucked a mouthful of smoke in, then inhaled the air of the library—that was how to do it, I knew. The smoke stung and tore at my throat, but I did not cough. When I exhaled, a tear rolled out of the corner of my eye.
“Are you crying?” Dad leaned toward me. He laughed.
I felt so dizzy, like I was being tossed on the sea in one of those crowded lifeboats.
I said, “No. But this isn’t how I thought it would be.”
I gave the cigarette back to my dad.
Naturally, there were cigarettes inside the Mercedes van. My dads would never prepare a vehicle without including such things as they considered to be necessities. The cigarettes were stored inside a drawer in the kitchen area. I looked at them. I did consider taking one out and smoking for only the second time in my life, but I shut the drawer and left them untouched.
I can’t say that Mel actually had anything to do with it. I think that maybe I was crazy because of what was happening inside my body; being out here above the hole, alone; and being frightened by the newness of everything, by the volume of that newness. Like that first cigarette, nothing was how I thought it would be. There were so many things I’d never done.
