Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

  I imagine he’s slicing the slick belly of the trout he’s just caught straight down the middle, with his bone-handled jack-knife. He’ll bury the guts. Soon the fry pan will be spitting and the smell of trout will cloud around the tent, calling me out. I sniff for the bitter, reassuringly adult smell of his campsite coffee, brewed up in a can the way he imagines cowboys did it, hunkered down under the stars, hearing the coyotes howl. Then I fall back asleep, smelling, listening.

  Rattle of pans, splash of water and stinging smoke of a white ash fire. The sun is hot now. It’s cleanup time. He tried to rouse me but I was dreaming and didn’t wake up. Dad’s bent over, washing up with his back turned, jawing happily, telling my godfather jokes.

  He tells the one about the three-legged man, which I don’t understand. Dave grunts. Dad tells the one about the farmer’s daughter and the three Wise Men. Dave grunts again. Then he tells one about a farmer who gets very upset because he sees that the neighbor’s son has pissed his name in the snow under his daughter’s window.

  “Now, Bill,” says the neighbor. “There’s no real harm in that. We both used to do that out in front of Betty Shaw’s house. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” says the angry farmer. “But this time the name was in my daughter’s handwriting.”

  Dave grunts very loudly at this. Dad chuckles and starts another one. I listen hard for my godfather. He must be just on the side of the tent where I can’t quite see him. I wonder what he’s doing and why he doesn’t say more. Then I hear my father . . . “‘Now,’ said the husband. ‘If you want to have sex, just squeeze my penis once—and if you don’t want to have sex, squeeze my penis forty-five times.’” Dad pauses, waiting for my godfather to laugh. Dad’s back is still to me. I hear a grunt. It doesn’t really sound like Dave. Come to think of it—it doesn’t really sound human. I’m beginning to think Dave is off in the woods taking a crap. I hear another grunt. I wonder who my old man’s talking to. We both hear another grunt and Dad starts wondering who in hell he’s talking to, too. At last, he turns around. I wriggle forward, mouth open.

  My father has for several minutes been washing up and telling off-color jokes to maybe not the largest—but unquestionably, indisputably and without a damn doubt—the fattest brown bear ever seen on the planet. Enormous. Rotund. Bloated. Obese. This is not a Jackie Gleason or John Goodman kind of plumpness. This isn’t even a Fat Albert or John Candy sort of bulk. No. This is more like the Haystack Calhoun of bears. Slabby, flabby—blubbery. Not a butterball bear, but an out-and-out blob. A slob. An obscenity.

  “Jesus!” my father shouts. The bear grunts again, maybe hoping for another joke—and no doubt a half dozen fresh rainbow trout. The shovel and the toilet paper are gone so I realize now it’s obvious where Dave is. Dad grasps this unfortunate truth at the exact same time and starts scrambling around beating on pots and pans like a maniac. It strikes me funny and for a moment I forget about the danger, even as frozen as I am with fear. Then my father starts grunting too. The bear is unimpressed. A terrible, hideous growling rips through the air and I suddenly smell the stench of the gut-bucket’s breath. The hair stands up on my old man’s head. I see him stoop down to pick up a trout that I figure he was saving for me. Then—just as he’s about to chuck it at the bear, Dave appears on the edge of the pines.

  He’s heading toward camp at impressive speed—yelling like a lunatic, swinging the shovel around his head like a battle-axe—a berserker who’s blown a gasket—a fisherman who’s been forced to kick off his old army-surplus pants in the violated privacy of the sacred morning dump and now sees only blood. It’s like Peter O’ Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, charging the train. “No prisoners! No prisoners! You FAT-ASSED BEAR BASTARDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!”

  Toilet paper flies. Dad is making a racket with the pans. The bear looks at Dad, and then at Dave and then—by God—he turns tail and wobbles into the woods in the other direction. Dave rushes up to the smoldering fire still swinging the shovel and shouting. Dad beats the pans like a tambourine. They’re cranked up to a frenzy still and somehow they start—well . . .

  They start to dance like savages, totally unaware of me. “We beat the Bear!” they chant. “We beat the Bear! Big Fat Bear!”

  At last they break down laughing, gasping for breath. Dave says, “Were you scared?” and the old man answers “Does a bear shit in the woods?” and they start to laugh and dance again. Two grown men by a cold stream, wrapping toilet paper around their heads like turbans, clapping and stamping.

  Such a small occasion in either of their lives—that crazy dance by the dying fire. But how immensely glad I was to be there—without them seeing me, without them really knowing. To catch a glimpse of them then, just for a moment, not as adults, or even as men—but as wild, foolish, golden, happy—invincible. Whatever it is we hope to be when we never grow up.

  SOMETIMES YOU MUST GET LOST MORE DEEPLY TO LEARN THE SECRET OF THE WAY OUT

  THE GIFT OF EVIL

  Age nine. We move, and for a while everything is fine. I get my first job, when Mr. Abernathy, who owns the One Hour Mar-tinizing dry cleaner, spots me sitting on the floor in Lucky reading a Jughead comic book. He says, “How’d you like to earn some money so you could buy one of those things?”

  It turns out he wants me to vacuum and sweep up the linoleum—clean the toilets. I like earning the money. I can buy my own Slurpees and Rick Brant books like The Wailing Octopus and The Electronic Mind Reader.

  Then on an unusually hot day for spring, March 29, to be precise, as I walk home from school, my life changes forever—and I smell the blossoming rhododendron and hear the heavy buzzing of the butter-colored bees even now.

  I could tell you that I was lured by a mentally disturbed boy twice my size and twice my age into a swath of dense bushes beside a then-abandoned and boarded-up Mother’s Club and a long, straight fuse of cinder-smelling railroad tracks, which have since been torn out to make a kind of nature walk—to be anally raped and then very likely murdered—but I’m not sure you’d understand me.

  What actually happened is that I stepped outside of time—I walked right through a wall that is always there to be breached; we just don’t know it under normal circumstances. Into the Other World.

  I found myself in a sanctuary of Evil.

  And I found myself.

  Many, far too many are the times since, when I’ve gone back to that glade of rhododendron, with the bee-humming intimacy closing in around me.

  The sweat smell of my attacker, alkaline and piercing. The lost-forever sense of the neighborhood, ordinary lives, the fuzz of daytime television drifting through the thick, still air. Just out of reach.

  It changes you when you have to plead for your life as a fourth-grader. It changes you when you are overpowered by superior strength, you have your pants torn down and a thumb thrust up your anus, in preparation for a semi-erect rapist’s penis—when you’re told in slow, measured tones that what you see around you—the dense green shadows, the hypnotic blur of the bees—is the last thing you’re ever going to see.

  It changed me.

  It brought forth an inner violence I didn’t know I housed and carried—that I concealed. That inner Creature, sickened by the pleadings of the Other, the whimpering, the loss of hope and dignity, felt the jabbing pain of the first rectal violation—before the true, final assault and the squeezing, wringing of the promised hands on neck—and reached out.

  The Creature grabbed a rock, a humble insignificant rock lying among the already dry grass, the shreds of Green Lantern comic books and teenage firecracker paper—and struck out with a fury I’d never known was inside. The rock said to the Creature, “This moment is not written in stone—there is still a door out, a door back, a door beyond. Believe in me and I will set you free.”

  I believed. But the Creature knew.

  It came forth like a cornered animal, retaliating with a deftness and tactical precision I could never have achieved. In the face of greater bu
lk and power, the Creature knew what it had to do and reared up like the monster all embattled inhuman nature is. One hundred thousand years of to-the-death close-quarters conflict streaming through the nerve fibers like a river of pure black luminous fire.

  Evil? We will show you evil, in a fistful of blood. Go back to the darkness you came from, for you have only summoned forth the Darkness you sought to reflect. Go back, Demon, before the manifestation of your skull is caved in and smeared like a crushed little butter-colored bee.

  I emerged as if newly born from that glade of rhododendron, running without pants and bleeding down the tracks to a neighbor’s house to call the police.

  There’s a certain sound blood makes when it’s flicking from you as you flee, staining hot steel rails. It’s a kind of quiet you can’t stop hearing.

  I’m still here—and I see that little boy without pants escaping from the rhododendron every day. Every day, he gets away to live on in me.

  My ravaged schoolbooks were later found by my friends, torn up and scattered among the bushes and along the tracks. When I returned from a six-week spell with my grandmother, recovering from the incident, I understood it had been assumed that I’d been murdered—and so I was greeted as something of a local celebrity and legend, having come back from the dead.

  And it was true. I had. But I couldn’t have done so without the Creature.

  That the Creature had, and has still, something mysteriously in common with the Demon has worried me every sweltering afternoon since. Yet I count that dark intimacy with a previously unknown side of myself as the price of continuance, the gift the Evil gave me.

  Not so very long after, two other boys were sodomized and left as blue-faced rag dolls in live oak groves nearby. By the same individual? Some mysteries are not so easily solved.

  Still, all these springtimes later, I believe I know exactly the words those two boys heard before they could no longer listen anymore. I think I know the sweet sharp scent of the armpit sweat they breathed—and the face the face made when the hands went out for them.

  Brothers in death we might have been—but for the Creature.

  Perhaps they noticed a distinct limp in the Demon from how I hurt him. But then again, maybe that only made him seem more vulnerable and believable. Maybe that was the ruse he ran with them, because he knew he couldn’t catch them if they had a chance to run for their lives.

  Maybe on that heat blur strip of California railroad track I didn’t really get away, I just survived. I think about that on hot spring afternoons when the rhododendron is in bloom and the bees are droning—and my heart starts beating faster.

  What does it mean to escape?

  I think about that every day.

  FIRE AND FORGET

  I turned ten inside a giant tire, honoring the engineers and earth-moving machines of the Oroville Land Dam, and a memorial to a mummified Indian chief who disintegrated into dust the moment he was exposed.

  The photograph is fuzzy because my father was embalmed with summer gin and there were hundreds of monarch butterflies snowing through the heat waves shimmering off the shale.

  I’d just been retrieved from a kind of camp, where he hoped I’d recover from the incident involving the eighteen-year-old boy, the railroad bridge, and the rumor that I’d died.

  I suspected that my dad wanted to take me away with him forever. What I didn’t know was that he owed more money in Reno than he could get his hands on and that my mother was having an affair. What he was about to find out was that after two weeks of making ice cream and root beer, I still wasn’t right in the head.

  He made me pose with my arms and legs out like spokes. Then he squeezed the trigger. The shutter clicked and the cocoon turned like a wheel into dust, butterflies falling like photographs on fire.

  I see the edges curl into wings, remembering the relief on my father’s face when we crossed the Canadian border that summer. Maybe he believed we could escape that easily—he was like that.

  I see myself creeping behind the kitchen at that camp where the teenage girls were washing dishes in their T-shirts and shorts, dancing to the Doors’ “Light My Fire.”

  I wanted to smell the wet cotton clinging to their skin, but when they saw my face pressed to the cool mesh of the screen, I was so moved, I ran away.

  I’d wander through school and drugs and women in a vicious circle of black rubber and squandered wings.

  Even now there’s no telling what I was fleeing from or toward. I was so eager and afraid to be found, I chose as my hiding place, the Wheel.

  JUICE IN THE PAIL

  One hundred miles from Thunder Bay we blew a gasket and overheated on a fresh-cut logging road, deep in the woods.

  Dad was half-drunk and I was scared—of the silence, the distance, of the endless Ontario trees. Who did we expect to find back there? Whacko woodsmen drunk as ferrets, crawling with guns? You bet we did.

  But the woods are weird precisely because they’re unpredictable. We came across a chain saw resting against a pine. It was still warm. I remember the light between the trees, the empty quiet bigger than a single sound, all sadness, like a sudden change in moods.

  Then the man who belonged to the chain saw appeared, hot wedges of gold spike-haloed around his head. He wore the plaid uniform of the tree-cutting man—arms huge from hefting the weapon of the woods.

  One hand outstretched to us with a shiny pail full of blue bleeding berries fresh-picked by his calloused fingers.

  We shared with this stranger the sweet juice of the northern berries, in the heart of his forest—half-shadow, half odd still light. We returned with him to the compound of trailers and shacks for Canadian bacon and blueberry flapjacks, then he towed us with one of the Kenworths back to the main road—we could limp to town from there. But before he roared back down the dusty track, he gave us a plastic bucket of berries, still smiling at our surprise.

  The town mechanic was surprised too—especially when he found out where we’d broken down. He pointed out that a campful of men alone in the woods can go a little loco sometimes. He claimed he’d found two hunting dogs beheaded by a small lake the previous autumn—and a husband and wife had disappeared not far away—the story made all the regional headlines.

  “Strange things happen in the woods,” he wheedled, with a malignant local smile.

  But Dad—his tongue still purple from the berry juice—had regained his faith. “Strange things happen,” he agreed.

  MOONLIGHT RIDER

  Out of the wreckage, out of the rape, out of the rhododendron, down the railroad tracks, I made a realization—I had an epiphany. The one thing I could’ve changed in that heat flicker afternoon was how I was moving. If I hadn’t been walking, I wouldn’t have ended up running, and bleeding. Every moment of darkness hinges on some weakness that’s gone overlooked. Think about that. I guarantee you, it’s true.

  The terror of the attack and the mythology that grew up around me after I reappeared in school after a six-week absence allowed me to see something I’d only felt, not fully perceived. I was walking home from school because I didn’t own a bike, and I didn’t own a bike because I didn’t know how to ride one. I’d never been taught. Swimming, fishing, skiing, horses—anything that my parents wanted to do—the opportunities were open. But on the level of basic kid survival skills in the world that I inhabited?

  Other kids were riding Stingray bikes with banana seats. Not me.

  My father got me driving, not just out in the desert, but in real metro traffic as a child. A child. Riding a bike? Nope. My sister had a bike, with a basket too, but I don’t recall her ever riding it. It just sat in the garage collecting dust.

  Why didn’t we ever ride bikes as a family? Because it would’ve been too normal? I used to ride a tricycle around in the house, for God’s sakes. We’d been blindfolded and shoved into water. Hooded on ponies. There’s an old tinted photograph of my mother as a child on a smaller version of a penny-farthing in a Little Orphan Annie dress. Wh
y did we miss this lesson? No answer.

  One morning Dad moved out—and I started running everywhere.

  But after the rhododendron, it dawned on me one afternoon. No one was going to help me solve the problem that I’d come to grasp. Only I could do that. So, I dusted off my sister’s greasy girl’s bike and pulled down our garage door. It was a big deal in those days for a boy to be seen riding a girl’s bike—especially if he didn’t know how to ride one at all.

  It will sound somewhat pathetic to admit that I first tried learning inside our garage. It didn’t occur to me at first that I was attempting to maneuver in a space that actually required maximum skill. After about the third collision with a wall, a few boxes knocked over, a scrape in an oil smear on the concrete, I began to see the situation. I needed space. Open space. I had to get up to some speed. I had to risk taking a tumble, but I needed to be somewhere where others couldn’t see me fail. Training wheels? That would’ve only been more humiliation. I was way past that point. I could see only one possible solution.

  The single nearby location where I was sure I wouldn’t be observed—that was open enough and flat enough—was the school playground at night. I couldn’t go to the shopping center parking lot—there would always be somebody passing by on the main road. No one would be at the school at night. I’d have all that black asphalt to skin myself on in private. But I’d have to walk my sister’s goony girl’s bike past the place where I’d seen my life nearly end, in the dark when everyone (hopefully) was sleeping. And I needed a full moon so I could see. A light on the bike wouldn’t do. Not for a beginner, a virgin on two wheels. (I’d later come across a line in a book of Japanese poetry . . . Be wary of all worlds in which you cannot give birth to yourself.)

  The full moon came but a few days later, and I knew it was do it now or not at all. There’s something of a relief in those kinds of crises. Everything for a moment at least becomes clear and sharply outlined. Like the pine trees and ominous shapes of parked cars. I couldn’t sleep after the attack anyway.