Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe

by Preston Norton

  The Shannondale Cemetery wasn’t the prettiest thing on God’s green earth. I mean, it wasn’t even really green, and it certainly didn’t look like God had any part in its making. It was this brown-patchy, weed-ridden field of trailer-trash blah, because apparently people like my family had to bury their dead somewhere, too. Tombstones stuck out of the rain-drenched earth every which way like a mouthful of broken, crooked teeth.

  Shane’s headstone was a tooth that hadn’t grown in yet; a tooth that would never grow in. It was a horizontal slab of cheap marble with the fewest words possible chiseled into its empty surface, because words apparently cost money, too:

  SHANE LEVI HUBBARD

  IN GOD’S CARE

  Beneath this were tiny, almost invisible dates that were way too close together. Sixteen years and one month.

  Today—April 12—was his birthday.

  He should have been seventeen today. But he wasn’t. He never would be. He was frozen—a permanent, chronological fixture in the annals of time.

  I was now older than Shane by weeks.

  There was something deeply unsettling about becoming older than your older brother. Like you were disturbing the natural order of things.

  It had stopped raining a while ago, but I could feel the storm inside of me. Not a raging thunderstorm or anything like that. Just this endless downpour. Filling me up. Drowning me.

  “Hey, bro,” I said.

  Shane didn’t respond. Because he was dead, obviously.

  Shane had always had the answer to everything. Even when he didn’t really know. It was the confidence behind the answer. I would have followed that confidence to the end of the world.

  Unfortunately, the end of the world was sooner for Shane, and here I was, left with nothing but this gaping hole. Nothing but rain and drowning and slowly dying, but never death, because that would just be too damn easy.

  “So I don’t know if you’re in heaven or hell or some sort of weird purgatory-limbo-thingy,” I said, “but it sure as hell has to be better than here.”

  Shane didn’t say anything.

  “Is there anything there? I mean, I know this stupid rock says ‘In God’s Care,’ but headstones are supposed to say shit like that to make people feel better. But, like…is he there?”

  Nothing.

  “Even if there isn’t a God or a heaven or anything,” I said, “if you could just, like, haunt me or do some of that freaky ghost shit and scare the crap out of me every once in a while, I’d totally be okay with that.”

  Shane gave the obvious response.

  “Think it over,” I said. “Maybe I’ll steal a Ouija board.”

  I left Shane in the crooked, broken mouth of the Shannondale Cemetery. Somehow, I felt a little less alive leaving this home for the dead.

  I lived in Arcadia Park, which was, in fact, not a park at all. It was a trailer park. The funny thing about trailer parks is that all the stereotypes—that trailer parks are low-class, trashy, cockroach-infested little shithole excuses for homes…

  They’re all true.

  I walked in the door—this sad, rectangular thing barely hanging by its hinges. The first thing people usually noticed was the cat-piss smell, which, fortunately, I’d gotten used to years ago. We didn’t have any cats. The second thing people usually noticed was the nicotine stains on the walls—this ghastly yellow splotchiness that looked like cat piss. None of us smoked. My dad quit smoking ten years ago, but I had a theory that it was only so he could afford his drinking problem.

  And boy, did he drink.

  He was the third thing people usually noticed—sitting in the recliner wearing a mustache, a camouflage trucker hat, and a bottle of Bud Light in his hand, hooked to the football game on TV like it was his iron lung. It was his way of vicariously reliving his own football glory days that ended after his own stint at HVHS. He wasn’t as big as me, but what he lacked in size, he more than made up for in dangerous levels of drunk-ass mean.

  The bad news beat me home. Principal McCaffrey called about my suspension.

  Normally, my mom picked up the phone. God gave my dad two hands—one for the TV remote and one for his Bud Light. He didn’t have a third pick-up-the-phone hand. And even if he did, there was still the issue of getting his lethargic ass off the recliner.

  Every time my mom got the bad news, she scolded me in private. She never told my dad, because she preferred me alive rather than dead. I listened, mostly because I cared about her, and I told her I’d never do it again, even though I had no such intention. I didn’t want to break her heart, but at the same time, remember High School Rule Number One? Remember Number Two?

  Remember High School Rule Number Three? Something has to speak louder than words. Words didn’t do shit.

  But all this was aside from the point. The point was that my mom wasn’t home. And naturally, my dad didn’t pick up the phone. But Principal McCaffrey did leave a message on the answering machine—this ancient, telephonic mechanism used by poor people to record messages and dodge calls from debt collectors.

  My dad heard that, all right. And he’d had plenty of time to get copiously drunk and stew over it.

  “You know what pisses me off the most?” he said.

  This wasn’t a rhetorical question. My dad didn’t ask rhetorical questions. And if you waited long enough to figure that out on your own, it’d probably be through an ancient Chinese martial art known as zui quan, or “drunken fist.”

  Okay, not really.

  But really.

  “What pisses you off the most?” I asked. My tone was flat—undisturbed—but there was a cloud of dread wafting beneath the surface.

  “No,” said my dad. He raised a dangerous finger, pointed it at me. “I want you to tell me what pisses me off the most. You’re a smart kid, Cliff,” he said. “You inherited my vast intellect, after all. Tell me: What pisses me off the most?”

  He didn’t ask rhetorical questions, but he sure as hell liked to play mind games.

  “Having to see my ugly face every morning for the next week?” I said. (Sometimes, self-deprecating humor worked in my favor.)

  “Hey, hey, hey!” he snapped. “You inherited half that face from me, you ungrateful shit. If you’ve got a problem with your face, take it up with your mom.”

  Despite appearances, my dad was actually a razor-tongued smart-ass. I suppose I inherited that from him. However, most smart-asses use sarcasm as a weapon because it’s universally understood that the alternative—violence—is morally wrong.

  For my dad, it was merely foreshadowing.

  “I called your principal back,” he said. “Asked how the Zimmerman kid looked. You know what she said? She said not to worry, he doesn’t have a scratch on him.”

  Shit.

  “A scratch! How the hell does a kid your size get suspended for a week, and not even lay a scratch on the other guy?”

  “I dunno. He’s a quarterback on the football team.”

  In retrospect, this was one of the dumber things I could say. It brought up a centuries-old argument that I was not ready to have again.

  My dad stood up, which meant shit was real.

  Even though he was smaller than me, it was scary when he stood up. There was something in the way his entire body tensed—like his veins might pop and he’d literally explode. More important, his hands were fast. If ass beatings were playing cards, he was a Vegas dealer.

  “You see, that’s the problem,” he said. “If you’d stop watching all those goddamn sci-fi movies and join the football team like I’ve told you a hundred thousand times, you wouldn’t fight like a little queer.”

  “I don’t fight like a queer,” I said—a little too defensively. “There were two of them. I punched Kyle Dunston’s face inside out.”

  “Man, I don’t give a shit about the Dunston kid. He’s a skinny-ass bitch. He was collateral damage. The fact of the matter is that you picked a fight with the Zimmerman kid, and he walked away completely unscathed—which wouldn’
t have happened if you’d join the fucking football team.”

  My dad stepped away from his recliner. He was straight up, tense, and ready to deal.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  I’d been in this situation before. He was giving me an ultimatum: either join the football team or get my ass kicked. He did the same thing to Shane, and Shane’s answer was always the same. I felt Shane’s words in the back of my throat.

  “Football’s dumb,” I said.

  My dad stopped. He stopped the way the world stops and the air goes silent before the sound waves catch up with the atomic mushroom cloud exploding in the distance.

  “What did you say?”

  He knew what I said. There was no going back. But I didn’t want to go back. Not today.

  This was when the true Clifford Hubbard came out. Not the Neanderthal. Not the juvenile delinquent. This was the person who was nothing but emptiness. He was only this eggshell. Hollow. Cracked.

  “You heard me,” I said.

  Or at least that’s what I tried to say. I didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence.

  My mom came home at eleven. As usual.

  I heard her talking with my dad in the living room. She laughed at something he said. She always laughed, whether or not what he said was actually funny. I heard my dad bring my name up, but it was so casual—so dismissive—I might as well have been laundry or a random item for the grocery list.

  She came straight to my room. As usual.

  She was still wearing her Hideo’s Video uniform—baby blue, matching her soft eyes. Hideo’s Video—owned by this Japanese retrophiliac, Hideo Fujimoto—was the only video store in Happy Valley. It was the last middle finger saluting to Netflix and Redbox, and you know what? It had business! Because sometimes people want to watch that awesome movie from way back in the day, and sometimes those assholes at Netflix cycle it out of their rotation, and then what are you supposed to do? The truth is that people like going to video stores. Especially ones where the clerk happens to know everything there is to know about every movie ever filmed in the history of ever.

  That was my mom.

  It was actually thanks to her job at Hideo’s Video that Shane and I had a pretty sweet setup in our room. We inherited an ancient thirteen-inch TV/DVD/VCR combo, and Hideo let us have our pick of everything that cycled out of inventory and hadn’t been purchased from the discount bin within X amount of time. We had three whole bookshelves filled with the Hollywood greats—Ridley Scott and James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino. If we had to pick a favorite genre, it would probably chisel down to a solid tie between sci-fi and gangster films. Jim Carrey was a close third place. (Yes, Jim Carrey is totally a genre in and of himself.)

  “Hey, sweetie,” said my mom.

  Not We need to talk, or I thought you said you weren’t going to get in any more fights, or anything like that. Just this…love. This love that hurt because I knew I was disappointing her, and her heart was just too big to tell me the truth.

  “Hey,” I said. I was lying on my bunk bed—bottom bunk, of course, because the top belonged to Shane, and I respected his space. I pretended to read my book. Mostly to hide the right side of my face. It was easier to pretend like nothing was wrong. Because, like, when everything is wrong, where the hell do you even start?

  My mom sat down on the corner of my bed that wasn’t covered in Cliff. “Whatcha reading?”

  “A book.”

  “Oh, please. Stop. Spare me the details. I can’t. I just can’t.”

  I couldn’t help snickering. I was defenseless. I closed the book and showed her the cover.

  “Speaker for the Dead?” said my mom in her worst attempt at not sounding impressed. “Dang, we’re busting out the heavy Orson Scott Card. That’s some pretty philosophical sci-fi. You reading that for school?”

  “I’m suspended, remember? And I don’t do schoolwork.”

  “Oh, right. Because my rebel son only reads American literary classics for fun. Sorry, I forgot.”

  “It’s science fiction.”

  “Hey, only a snob sticks his nose up at science fiction. The best sci-fi tells us the truths about ourselves that we’re too afraid to hear. What part are you at?”

  “I’m at the part where they talk a lot. I mean, one guy got gutted by these piggy aliens, and they laid all his organs out like lawn ornaments, so that was pretty intense. But now everybody’s just talking. I think that’s the point of this book—talking without getting to the point.”

  “I’m on the edge of my seat just thinking about it.”

  “You should be.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, good.”

  “Fine.”

  I was smiling. I didn’t even realize it until my guard had already dropped. Hell, my guard fell to the floor, broke through the floorboards, and went twenty feet underground. And that’s when my mom’s smile faded.

  I forgot to hide the right side of my face.

  Not that the left side of my face was a basket of roses. Aaron had given me a pretty even facelift on both sides.

  But my dad swung with his left arm. My mom knew that.

  This was the part where she was supposed to say she was sorry. That things would change. That she would divorce that bastard and get us out of this shithole, so we could start a new life—far, far away from everyone and everything. But that’s not what she said.

  I’d heard this speech before, and it was bullshit.

  “I have to believe that the man I fell in love with is still in there,” she said. “Somewhere. I just…I can’t give up on him.”

  Normally, I had a filter for my mom. But today was no “normal” day. Between the fight with Aaron, my meeting with Principal McCaffrey, getting suspended, and my dad beating the Western Hemisphere of my face into the prime meridian of my skull, my filter was crushed and shattered and all but turned to dust.

  “Did you know that Shane died hating you?” I said.

  I didn’t think about the words. They just came out. My words were like my dad’s fists—hard, fast, and uncompromising. He never hit my mom, of course—Shane and I were his punching bags—but if he did punch her, this was probably how she would look. Like a scared, wounded animal.

  And yet, I continued.

  “He hated you,” I said. “And for the longest time, I didn’t understand why. But now…I think I get it.”

  Unlike Shane, I couldn’t hate my mom. But I could sure as hell ignore her. In some distant corner of reality, I heard her give the same old excuses like they meant something. But they didn’t. Not even remotely. Sooner or later, she would get the hint that this conversation was over. She would go to bed with the asshole whose memory she couldn’t fall out of love with, and I would be left alone.

  Hell, I already was.

  It was amazing how fast a week went without school. Naturally, I stayed as far away from home as possible. My happiness depended on it. Actually, happiness was a strong word. My willpower to not smother myself to death with my own pillow depended on it.

  I had a favorite place in town. A special place. With a week of vacation, I had a lot of time to spend there, meditating and deliberating upon the Meaning of Life, or the staggering lack thereof.

  Shane called it the Monolith.

  Basically, it was this abandoned, unfinished seven-story office building. It was meant to be the new headquarters of the Happy Valley Ale Company, founded in 1968, but fate had a funny way of fucking things up.

  It all started with the original Happy Valley Ale factory, located on the outskirts of town. In the beginning, everyone in town worked at the factory. Happy Valley was the factory. The entire town was built on a single idea: Happy Valley Ale was going to revolutionize beer. With its state-of-the-art ale-brewing technique, it came in a wide variety of flavors, including apple, pear, pineapple, banana, plum, cherry, and prune.

  What the company failed to realize was that this was motherfucking Montana—the ma
nliest state in the Union. A land where men shaved with axes, head-butted bison, and chopped down trees with their humongous dicks. Montana men didn’t drink anything less than real American beer. None of this ale bullshit. The hell’d they think this was? Middle-Earth?

  And one thing was for damn certain—Montana men didn’t drink anything fruity.

  The Happy Valley Ale Company collapsed a couple years later. The town essentially died with it.

  The unfinished office building—the Monolith—was a skeleton. It was all bone-colored concrete floors, window frames like empty eye sockets, and unsealed walls with rib cages of exposed support beams. It was a labyrinth of pseudo-urban decay.

  My and Shane’s favorite place in the Monolith was near the peak of the building—this concrete lip jutting from an open, gaping mouth, overlooking all of Happy Valley. Once upon a time, I’m sure it was supposed to be a balcony with a sliding glass door and a fancy railing, probably for some high-and-mighty business executive—some Charles Foster Kane of booze—who would walk out in his double-breasted pinstripe suit, smoke his Cuban cigar, and observe his alcohol empire.

  But that future was never to be. There was no sliding glass door. No balcony railing. Just this slab of concrete sticking out like an ancient spaceship landing pad.

  Shane and I used to chill up there. From that vantage point, you could see the mountains encompassing Happy Valley in a cereal bowl of Shitty Puffs. A river ran straight through it—east to west—dividing the slums and the nice part of town. It was like Mother Nature herself understood the elitist concepts of class and segregation. The Monolith towered on the edge of the south side of the river—the slummy side—along with the factory, which was now a sprawling, industrial coffin left to rot.

  That was my side.

  The nice part—the part that had nothing to do with Happy Valley Ale, the part that was economically reborn—was where people like Aaron Zimmerman and Kyle Dunston and Lacey Hildebrandt lived, with their cars and their allowances and their beautiful Modern Family–esque dysfunctional families. The sort of dysfunctional that always had happy endings and a moral to the story.