Sacred Alarm Clock

by John T. Biggs

  “Friendly fire,” I tell Mary, but I’m not sure that’s the right way to describe what just happened. The friends who killed the Bubba accidentally gather behind him at the door. Their faces don’t look sorry in the moonlight. One of them steps over the body. Then another. Then another.

  Mary climbs onto my back again. She wraps her arms around my throat and breathes panic into my right ear.

  I holster my pistol and back into the shadows while the Bubbas shine their flashlights at the moon. Everything my mother told me about drugs was true.

  “Sorry I ever doubted you, Mom.” I aim those words at the sky like I’m talking to God again. I wonder if that means I think she’s dead. It’s hard to tell, with so much going on.

  “NNNAAA.” Mary bounces up and down to remind me we don’t have time to think about our mothers.

  High ground sounds like the right place to go, so I climb a steel fire escape ladder to the top of the Central Headquarters. Mary hops off my back, so I know we’re safe, at least for the time being.

  The Bubbas run around the compound shouting, “Raj,” and “Mary,” and “Ally ally all come free.” I’m afraid they will figure out we’re on the roof, but they are too busy chasing ghosts of us between buildings, and whenever they look up, all their attention is captured by the moon.

  I pull out my pistol and point it at the Bubbas.

  “If I shoot, I’ll give away our hiding place,” I tell Mary. “Besides, there are still too many.” But what I’m thinking is, There’s no end to shooting once you start.

  The roof of Central Headquarters isn’t quite flat, but nearly. There’s a rim of brick around it, like an old time castle, tall enough to hide all of Mary except for her head.

  She runs around the roof the way an ordinary child might do, inspecting the moon’s reflection in puddles of water that have collected in the low spots. Lots of puddles, each with its own full moon bouncing light around the roof so our faces are lit from the bottom.

  Some of the moon reflections fit around the shapes of empty bottles thrown up here by soldiers during their two days a month of active duty training. Large brown bottles that once held Budweiser, and Stroh’s, and Labatt 50. Green bottles that held a dozen varieties of apple wine and muscatel. Clear bottles that held Miller High Life and Country Club Malt Liquor.

  I select a green one with a nearly naked woman on the label. She is too fat to be a modern girl and too slutty to be art. She’s lying on a bed of block letters that spell out the brand—Sweet Pig. Perfect Bubba bait.

  I go to an edge of the Central Headquarters Building where the Bubbas aren’t and toss the bottle off. It breaks beside a large gasoline tank truck—maybe the last one in Oklahoma City.

  The Bubbas run toward the sound of broken glass, holding pistols in one hand and flashlights in the other. They see people who aren’t there and shoot them. They see people who are there and shoot them too.

  Screams and the smell of gunpowder and gasoline fill the air, but nothing explodes or even catches fire and the shooting goes on so long, Mary and I fall asleep beside a chimney.

  I dream of blood and bullets and little girls who hold on tight.

  • • •

  We are awakened by the sound of Colonel shouting orders.

  “Get those jerry cans positioned. Cap ’em when they’re full. Over here, replace this one.”

  Maybe this is a good sign. Colonel is running things again.

  The cement between the buildings is littered with dead Bubbas soaked in gasoline. Gas is spurting out the tank through bullet holes into green metal cans that are almost too heavy to lift when they are full.

  I climb down the ladder with Mary on my back and go to stand by Colonel. He kicks a dead Bubba and says, “Look at all the trouble you caused, Raj.”

  He makes the Bubbas get all the jerry cans, but it’s clear there won’t be nearly enough.

  I start to tell the Colonel none of this was my fault, but he kicks another dead Bubba.

  “Wasted men is one thing, Raj, but wasted gasoline. . . Best thing is to give them Mary.” He nudges the dead Bubba’s nose with the toe of his wingtip shoe. “Trade her for the ecstasy. If there’s any left.” Colonel walks up to the tank and raps on the side. There’s at least three feet of gasoline above the lowest bullet holes. “The boys’ll swap their dope for the girl, Raj. Don’t you think?”

  What I think is, there are only four Bubbas left. Four Bubbas and Colonel—one less than the number of bullets in my pistol.

  “Consider the alternatives, Raj. It’s an important decision.”

  I look at the pinky ring Colonel gave me. I feel Mary on my back. I take the pack of Marlboros out of my pocket. One left. Perfect timing.

  I put it in my mouth, but I don’t light it.

  “I don’t think Mary wants to go with the Bubbas.” I talk around the cigarette the way Clint Eastwood did in spaghetti westerns. I wonder what those words would sound like in Italian.

  I pull my pistol out and point it in the general direction of the Bubbas, not threatening Colonel yet, but defying him.

  “Keep working,” Colonel tells them. “Raj won’t shoot. He needs time to think, is all. Are you thinking, Raj?”

  I’m thinking, There’s no end to shooting once you start.

  I’m thinking, Do I really care about Mary all that much?

  I’m thinking, Stop Colonel! Because he is walking toward me, with his hands out, the way he forced the Nazi Bubba to give Mary to him.

  “Stop Colonel!” But he doesn’t stop until I point the pistol at him and pull the trigger.

  Click. The pistol jumps in my hand even though it doesn’t fire.

  It takes me five clicks more before I understand.

  “Did you think I’d give you a gun that worked?”

  The Bubbas stop collecting gasoline long enough to laugh at me.

  “I guess you’ve made your decision, Raj.” He crosses his arms and stares at me. He’s made his decision too.

  Mary loosens her grip around my neck, like she might be ready to let go. Like she might be better on her own than hooked up with Raj Patel, a Bengali-Okie-Virgin, who’s only been a man long enough to smoke nineteen cigarettes.

  I spit the twentieth Marlboro on the ground. I holster the pistol. I shine my pinky ring on my pants, and pull my Zippo Lighter out.

  “Raj. . .”

  The sound of a Zippo opening isn’t as loud as a pistol shot, but it fills up the air around the gasoline truck. I roll the steel wheel with my thumb and catch the wick on fire. I hold it in above my head for a moment the same way the Statue of Liberty holds her torch.

  “Think about this for a minute, Raj.”

  I toss the Zippo into the gasoline that’s pooling around the tank truck. Mary bounces up and down to remind me that we’re flammable. I take a step backward, then another, but the Bubbas stand perfectly still. So does Colonel, because they see the almost invisible blue layer of flame that floats knee level for a little while before it lights up the air like a camera flash.

  They stand there as I walk away with Mary on my back, watching us get smaller while their lives are sucked into a ball of flame that gathers over the truck and lifts into the sky.

  “Quick.” Mary’s vocabulary comes back as the Central Headquarters Building catches fire.

  “Very quick,” I tell her. “All the really important things happen in an instant.”

  Raj told Mary, “Got to get worse before I get better. Got to hit the bottom before I bounce back.” Then he sat down in his chair and didn’t get up again.

  That was two days ago—three, if midnight has come and gone. Mary can’t keep track of hours in the dark so she counts her heartbeats and wonders what she’ll do if Raj dies.

  She tries to slide into a dream where Raj’s fever goes away and they both live happily ever after, the way people do in stories about the olden days. Everybody had a last name back then, and a birthday you could circle on the calendar, and parents. They had frie
nds who talked to each other just for fun—taking turns, not interrupting, using inside voices. Like the voices in the living room that are probably part of a dream trying to break into her sleepless night.

  In the olden days there were electric lights. You could turn them on with a flick of a finger. Darkness vanished in an instant. The way Raj said his fever would vanish in a day or two or three. After he hit bottom.

  But electricity is gone forever, and the fever might be here to stay and the words in the living room are getting louder but still aren’t clear enough to understand. First, there’s Raj’s dad-voice, the one he saves for giving orders like, “Don’t go outside after dark, even to look for your favorite cat.”

  The second voice is full of tears, like Mary’s, when she talks about all the things that disappeared before she learned how to remember—her mother, her father, towns where people lived instead of ghosts.

  The first voice asks questions. The second answers. Raj, and someone who is not Raj, even though there’s nobody else in the whole word. No one living anyway.

  When footsteps fall between the words Mary knows she’ll have to investigate, because Raj is too weak to leave his chair except for bathroom visits. Unless the fever made him strong again, the way fevers sometimes do.

  Maybe a ghost is here to fetch him off to where everybody goes after they’re through with living. Where everybody in the world already went, except for Raj and Mary.

  “Not yet, please.” She runs the words through her lips without any noise behind them. That’s all you need when you’re asking ghosts for favors. Some ghosts are friendly, some are not. It’s all in the diary she found under a loose board in the closet floor—hidden below all the clothes that fit perfectly since her growth spurt.

  The diary tells her everything Raj can’t—what it’s like to get your first period or how to keep your boyfriend happy.

  Boyfriends—one more thing that doesn’t happen anymore.

  The diary-girl didn’t have a name, just the letter, M, signed under every entry in red ink. Red is the color of the most important diary-things, like how M felt when a boy kissed her. Like how boys did everything M said because she was so pretty.

  Mary is pretty too. Pretty enough to write in bright red ink, “I am very pretty,” if she had a diary.

  One side of her face is exactly like the other. Her lips are a perfect cupid’s bow. Her hair is glossy black with streaks of gold like people used to pay hairstylists to put in. Blue eyes, long eyelashes, straight teeth, and tall. Tall enough to be fourteen—at least. When her breasts come in she’ll be a real hottie, just like M. It’s good to have an older girlfriend, even if she is a ghost.

  “My best friend who never knew me.” Mary says that out loud, so M will know she really means it. Her fingers tingle when she rubs the letters pressed into the cover of the diary hidden underneath her pillow. Cimarron Girls, embossed in gold. Even Raj doesn’t know exactly what that means. And Raj knows almost everything.

  He says ghosts are something people made up to pass the time, like the ghost of Christmas present, or the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But The Cimarron Girls are definitely real. At night, Mary hears them moving through the cabin. Their footsteps and voices blend with noises the cabin makes as it settles into the Arbuckle Mountains. Sometimes the Cimarron Girls show her things with bumps and thumps, like the key to the cellar taped to the back of a picture that fell off the wall and shattered. The Cimarron Girls can whisper if they have to tell you something so important random noises aren’t enough. And there’s the diary.

  • • •

  Mary can’t understand what Raj is saying, but she knows it is a question because the sentence floats up toward the end.

  The quiet voice answers too softly to tell if it belongs to a man or a woman.

  A dead man or a dead woman? She has to know.

  Her feet remember every square inch of the hardwood floor. The planks are worn into familiar patterns by her footsteps and Raj’s—the million-zillion footsteps since he saved her life when she was too young to remember anything but fear.

  A million-zillion and one footsteps, a million-zillion and two. Turn to the left and the yellow kerosene lantern light shows her the rest of the way.

  Raj paces in figure eights sputtering words that stick together like the vowels are magnetized. One slur runs into another. He keeps on talking when his breath is all used up. Keeps on talking while he’s breathing in. His backward words are filled with whistles, punctuated by slurps. The cats have formed a circle around Raj, hiding under furniture in case ghosts are real. They turn some of their attention Mary’s way, trying to decide if it’s safer to stay inside or take their chances with coyotes. The kerosene lantern sputters on the mantle beside the pictures of the women who built the cabin. Their eyes flicker with the flame and follow Raj’s progress.

  He shouts, “Cimarron Girls,” as clear and sharp as a thunderclap. The way he finishes stories with surprise endings.

  Cats streak across the room in too many directions to follow. They disappear, like the legendary Cimarron Girls who collected everything they needed to survive and left it all for Raj and Mary. And then evaporated, like cats who stay outside too long.

  Raj picks up a framed photograph of two older women and a girl who looks like Mary posed underneath a cottonwood tree.

  “Who took the photograph?” Raj’s eyes find her, but they dance away.

  His breathing slows. So do his words. Raj’s skin looks yellow in the lantern light, as yellow as a burning wick that’s almost out of fuel. His black hair is plastered against his head with sweat. A trickle of blood has dried in a crease at the corner of his lip.

  “Someone always takes the photograph.” The sentence forms on a stream of air pulled backwards through his lips by lungs that are as empty as the world.

  Raj drops the picture a second before his knees fold and lower him onto fragments of non-reflective glass.

  “Can’t fix things anymore,” Raj says. “Broken things stay broken.”

  He’s too heavy for her to carry, so she slides a cushion under his head. She brings him a glass of water and gives him one of the Augmentin tablets the Cimarron Girls left behind. There aren’t many, but maybe there are enough to make Raj bounce.

  • • •

  The sun climbs high enough to shine into the living room window and cover Raj with a rectangle of yellow light. He sits up part way and drinks chicken noodle soup from a giant coffee cup with the word Halliburton printed on the side.

  “Chicken soup and sunlight.” Mary smiles, but she can’t hold it very long, because even though Raj is better he still looks pretty bad.

  “I’ll have to use the bathroom soon,” he says.

  It’s already too late, but Mary pretends she hasn’t noticed.

  “Bad night.” She puts another Augmentin tablet in his mouth and watches him struggle to get it down. The ghosts talked with Raj off and on till dawn. Whatever they told him made his fever break. It had to be the ghosts because it takes three days for antibiotics to do anything.

  “Eight hundred seventy-five milligrams,” she says. “Sounds like a lot, but some of the milligrams are expired.”

  One of the nameless cats climbs onto Raj’s belly and gives him a special happy paws massage.

  “You never see cats die,” he says. “They go outside. They find a secret place. They evaporate.” The cat doesn’t mind the smell of urine, or the talk of cats evaporating, or the way Raj’s fingers tremble when he strokes her behind the ears.

  M says there are pharmacies in Ardmore full of miracle drugs put up on shelves where they last for years. Mary shows Raj the page where M wrote this in black longhand letters as loopy and symmetrical as petals on a daisy.

  “It’s been years already.” Raj makes a face like his soup has turned to vinegar.

  “M wouldn’t mention it unless it was important.” But M wrote the message in black, the color of maybe, the color of doubts in the middle of the night. Only
her signature is red.

  The cat on Raj’s chest opens her eyes. The fur along her spine stands up, like there’s a coyote at the door. She leaps away and disappears into a secret cat-place.

  “I have to. . . ” Raj’s eyes wander in different directions, like a pair of spiders stalking the same butterfly. He blows a stream of air in her face that smells like rotten apples.

  “Tell you. . .” His voice squeaks like a rusty hinge. His head tips back and smashes against the cushions. His arms reach into space while his legs curl in a knot, like an insect dropped onto a burning log.

  She tries to hold him, but Raj’s body clenches into spasms that shake the room. Just when she thinks the seizure will never stop, it does.

  Raj’s head droops back. His mouth falls open. Respiratory arrest. Mary read about it in a Red Cross manual the Cimarron Girls left in the cabin in case of emergency—like now.

  “Are you OK?”

  She shakes him but it does no good.

  “Call 911,” she says, because those are the magic numbers in the Red Cross book.

  She sweeps Raj’s mouth with her fingers, tips his head. She locks her lips over his. The rotten apple taste is almost enough to make her pull away, but not before she fills his lungs with air. She can’t remember what comes next, but Raj coughs and sits up.

  “Better.” The blue in Raj’s lips turns scarlet. He stands up on his own, touches the urine stain on his pants. “Got to take a bath.”

  “Plenty of water in the roof tank,” she says. “Do you want me to start a fire and boil some?”

  “Cold is good.” Raj rubs cramps out of his arms and legs, smiles and stretches. “We’ll talk when I come out.” His breathing is regular. His voice is strong. “About things I haven’t told you.” Strong and straight, like the old Raj, who carried Mary on his shoulders when she was young and fussy and too tired to walk.

  M says people sometimes get stronger just before they die. That’s near the end of the diary, where everything is written in red.

  When Mary hears the water running, she counts the Augmentin tablets. Not nearly enough. She tears a blank page out of M’s diary and leaves a note for Raj to read when he’s clean enough to tell her what she needs to know.