“Fellow like you must surely need the money,” the kid said in a snotty kind of way. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a guy with my build.”
Joe didn’t like that, but then he figured maybe the kid was crazy. “Keep your money, kid,” he said, slow and careful. He turned away.
“Make it a hundred, then,” the kid said behind him. “You turn that down and then I’ll know you’re afraid.”
The kid said that last part loud. When Joe turned around the others were looking at him. “You got a big mouth, kid.”
“A hundred twenty five.” The wound was soaked now, shining under the big gym lights. The crusted lips looked like they jumped a little, and suddenly Joe was thinking about something they used to do when they were kids—throw big fat earthworms into a campfire. Just when they started to burn, just before they started melting, they looked just like the kid’s wound. Joe could feel himself sweat, and that made him even madder.
“Your funeral,” he grunted, unable to look at the kid’s forehead anymore. He grabbed a towel and headed for Willy’s ring.
He didn’t know the kid was walking along beside him until the kid leaned over and whispered in his ear. Joe went funny all over, like cold water was dripping down his back. He could feel that burnt earthworm of a wound just inches away from his own face, the kid whispering into his ear like some dainty little girl.
“I want you to concentrate on my scar,” the kid whispered. “I want you to beat hell out of my head.”
In fury Joe grabbed the ropes and jerked himself up into the ring. What the hell kinda freakin’ shit pile was this kid, anyway? Freakin’ kid. Joe turned around and danced a little, stomping his anger into the mat. The kid pulled off his jeans—there were pale green trunks underneath—and climbed into the ring.
Joe jabbed the air in front of his head. “Fifty more and I’ll punch anywhere you like. I’ll pound you to bloody hamburger you pay me enough you fuckin’ freak.”
The kid smiled a thin line. Joe thought he looked constipated. “Sure,” the kid said. “Fifty more. All you have to do is tear my face off you big stupid prick!”
Then the kid waved his gloves around in the air like he was some kind of dancing puppet. He waved and made a little kissy face at Joe like he was making fun of him, like he was accusing him of something. Joe stood there watching that silly shit until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Then he waded into the kid.
The kid just opened up his arms like he was going to hug Joe, and that made Joe want to punch him all the harder. But the kid didn’t step any closer, just held his arms out like he was some kind of Christ, that awful worm jiggling on his forehead, and Joe gave that worm all he had, and the kid went down like a bag of wet laundry.
“You had enough, kid?” Joe was breathing hard, but it wasn’t because of the effort. He was so hyped up his head was swimming.
The kid looked up, his head greasy with blood. The worm was fatter, longer. Joe stared at the wound. It was still growing; the space between the crusted lips was broad and newborn pink. And moving.
“Christ …”
“Scared of a little blood, big boy?” the kid simpered. Then he blew Joe a kiss. Joe picked him up under the arms—grabbing him tighter as his gloves started slipping on the kid’s slick skin—and put him back on his feet. Joe smashed the worm a couple of more times and when it looked like the kid was going to fall over again he propped him up against the ropes. The kid smiled through blood-crusted lips, coughed, then leaned over and tried to kiss Joe. Joe went after him again, jackhammering his face.
And all the time the kid kept egging Joe on, pleading with him to hit him some more.
“Smash my face off, big guy!” the kid shouted through bubbled lips. And Joe did his damnedest to oblige. The worm jigged and wriggled, grew fatter and longer, stretched up into the kid’s hair, down the kid’s nose and across his lips.
Suddenly the kid screeched and stood straight up away from the ropes, blood spraying from his face, his arms reaching up over his head.
Joe backed away. The kid’s face folded, loosened, and began to fall. Torn at the eyes, the ears. Like an old, rotten T-shirt, Joe thought. Or like a snake shedding its skin. Or like a baby being born. The kid’s face fell off. And underneath there was another face: sharp, pink, a little bloody, and a little different from the one that now lay in a sloppy pile of skin and liquid at his feet.
“Hit me,” the kid said, spitting out the blood and stray bits of skin that still filled his mouth. “Hit me harder this time. I’ll pay another two hundred. Dammit, I’ll pay you as much as you want!”
Joe just stared at the mess on the mat, his gloved hands hanging limp at his sides.
“Can’t you see, you ape?” The kid started scratching at a spot on his forehead. “You stupid ass.” Joe could see the new skin on the kid’s forehead begin to split a little. “You moron. You afraid to hit me some more?” Joe stared at the beginnings of another wound, another worm. “Can’t you see, you motherfucker? Hit me! Bash my face away! Can’t you see there’s more?”
HUNGRY
Mama?
Vivian Sparks took her hands out of the soapy water and stared into the frosted kitchen window. There was a face in the ice and fog, but she wasn’t sure which of her dead children it was. Amy or Henry, maybe—they’d had the smallest heads, like early potatoes, and about that same color. Those hadn’t been their real names, of course. Ray always felt it was wrong to name a stillborn, so they didn’t get a name writ down on paper, but still she had named every one of them in her heart: Amy, Henry, Becky, Sue Ann, and Patricia, after her mother. Patricia had been the smallest, not even full-made really, like part of her had been left behind in the dark somewhere. Ray had wanted Patricia took right away and buried on the back hill, he’d been so mad about the way she came out. But the midwife had helped Vivian bathe the poor little thing and wrap her up, and she’d looked so much like a dead kitten or a calf that it made it a whole lot worse than the others, so dark and wet and wrinkled that Vivian almost regretted not letting Ray do what he’d wanted.
Mama …
But it wasn’t the dead ones, not this time. A mother knows the voice of her child, and Vivian Sparks felt ashamed to have denied it. It felt bad, always hearing the dead ones and never expecting the one she’d have given up anything for, no matter what Ray said. Ray wouldn’t have let her adopt him, if it hadn’t been for those stillborns, but she would have done it on her own if she had to, even if she’d had ten other children to care for. It was her own darling Jimmie Lee out there in the cold foggy morning. It had to be.
Vivian opened the back door and looked out onto the bare dirt yard that led uphill to the lopsided gray barn. Ray’s lantern flickered in there where he was checking on the cows. She couldn’t see much else because of the dark, and the fog. It was still trying real hard to be Spring here in late March—she’d caught a whiff of lilac breeze yesterday afternoon—but it worried her that the hard frost was going to put an end to that early flowering before she’d see any blossoms. That was always a bad sign when the lilacs came out too soon and the ice killed the hope of them.
“Mama, it’s me.”
Vivian reached up and touched her throat, trying to help a good swallow along. Suddenly her throat felt as if it were full of food, and she just couldn’t get it all down. Ray said it was because of Jimmie Lee, her problem with eating, said it had been like that for her ever since Jimmie Lee came into their lives. “You don’t eat right no more. I guess you can’t,” he said over and over, the way he repeated something to death when he had a mad feeling about it. “Can’t say that I even blame you—it’s understandable. Watchin’ him go at it, it’d put anybody off their food. That’s why I never watched.”
She guessed there was truth in what he said, but she didn’t like to think about it that way. What she liked to think was that it was all her feelings for Jimmie Lee coming up into her throat when she’d looked at him, or now when she thought about him, all the sadnes
s and the love that made it hard for her to breathe, much less eat. And the memory of him touching her on her throat, gazing at her mouth the night before he left home to join that awful show. That was another reason for her to be touching her throat now, in that same place.
“Mama, I come back to visit.”
Vivian could hardly speak. Maybe the love in her throat was so big it was closing up her windpipe. “Come on, come … on, honey. Been a long time.”
Past the east fence she could see the darkness gray a little and move away. She started to walk over but a simple yet awful sound—a young man clearing his throat—stopped her. She clutched the huge lump in her throat. It was warm, as if it might burn her fingers.
“Mama, I ate something off the road a while back. I just gotta get rid of it, then I’ll come up where you can see me.”
She turned her back to him even though it would have been much too dark to see what he was about to do. But after watching him a thousand times when he was little she felt like he was a grown boy now, and deserved some show of respect, and she wasn’t sure but maybe this was one way to do it. At the same time she knew her turning away wasn’t all being the good mama, either. She didn’t want to see it anymore. She didn’t feel like she should have to.
Back in the darkness there was a sound like damp skin stretching, splitting, some awful coughs and gurglings like her son’s throat was turning itself inside out (dear God it’s got worse!) and then a loud, mushy thump.
A few minutes later she could hear him walking up behind her. “I’m sorry, mama.” His voice was hoarse, like he’d been crying. He used to cry all the time when he was little, complaining all the time about being so hungry, and never getting full no matter how much she fed him, how much Ray let her feed him, or however much Jimmie Lee ate on his own to try to fill that awful hunger. His nose would run and his eyes would look all raw and scraped and he’d stop trying to keep himself clean. Vivian took a handkerchief out of her front apron pocket now and turned around to give it to him.
“Thanks, mama. I’ll get good and clean for you, just for you.” The young man standing in front of her, saying just what he used to say to her when he was a little boy and had made himself such an awful mess, was taller, surely, and had little scraggly patches of beard here and there where once had been unnaturally pink skin, but other than that he still seemed the pale, skinny little boy who had left her years ago. His chin was covered with thick, soupy slobber which he wiped off with the handkerchief. She didn’t mind—that had always been her job, to provide the handkerchiefs, the towels, waiting patiently while he cleaned himself up, directing him now and then to a missed spot or two. Ray had never been able to stand even that little bit of clean up; he’d always just left the room.
“My goodness!” She made herself sound impressed, although what she was really feeling was relieved, and desperate to hug him to her. “My handsome older son.”
Jimmie Lee grinned then, showing teeth even worse than she remembered. She could see that at least he’d been able to get some dental work done, but it looked like the fillings and braces had been filed, points added here and there to make him look more like a silly machine, some big city kitchen gadget of some kind. She wondered if it really helped him get the food down or if it was all just for some sideshow or movie work he’d been doing. He’d written her once about one of the movies—”Flesh Eaters From Beyond Mars,” or some such silliness. He’d said in the letter that the movie people liked him because he saved them money on special effects, but she’d never really understood what any of that was about.
Other than the metal in his mouth her sweet boy hadn’t changed much. Certainly he couldn’t weigh much more now than when he’d left her: his body straight up and down like a sleeve with no hips or shoulders to speak of, but his neck about twice as wide as it should be, and faintly ringed, like a snake’s belly. Set atop that stout neck was the largest jaw she’d ever seen—it hung out like the birdbath on top the pedestal she had out in the front flowerbed. His mouth was wider than normal, she guessed, but had never seemed as big as it should be for that size jaw. His lips were almost blue, and cracked, and there were a bunch more splits in the skin at the corners of his mouth. Because of all the stretching his skin had to do there, hair growth had always been spotty. She’d tried to get him to use lotions and oils, but like most children he just forgot all the time. So she’d always rub some into his face every night, being especially careful around the mouth and chin. She wondered if he knew somebody now who cared enough to do that for him.
His eyes were the wide eyes of a lost child’s, but then they always had been. Jimmie Lee now was just a larger version of the poor baby that had been born in a backwoods barn and just left there eighteen years before. No one else had wanted the funny looking child but Vivian had known from the very first moment she saw him that this was her son, and would be forever. Even Ray, for all his puffin’ and embarrassment about the boy, had resented it when one of the neighbors suggested that maybe they shouldn’t keep him. This was his son, even though sometimes he sorely couldn’t stand being around him.
And then Jimmie Lee had gone out into the world, maybe to find his “real” mother, or maybe to find whatever it was he was hungry for. She didn’t know, and was afraid then, and was afraid now, to ask. All she’d had to remember him by was this awful swelling in her throat every time she thought of him, and every time she struggled to eat or drink something. But nobody’d ever told her that life was fair to mothers.
“Did you ever find her, son?”
“Who, mama?”
“Why, the one who gave birth to you. The one who just left you here all them years ago.” She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but the vein went too wide and deep to hide.
His throat gurgled and a raw smell escaped. She started to turn away, but he held out his hand to stop her. “It’s okay, mama. I still got it under control. I’m a lot more careful about how and when I eat now. Something I learned on the road, having to be around other people.” He looked at her. She waited. “I never found her, mama. Guess I didn’t try much after the beginning. I guess I was a little afraid of what she’d look like.”
“You stayin’ long?”
“I can’t. I finally figured out it’s best I be around folks who don’t know me so well. But I just had to see you again, and smell you, and listen to you talk. I had to.”
Her throat filled and she had to force it back down so that she could speak again. “You best get inside now, have something to …” She looked away from his nervous, hungry face, to where he’d come from in the dark beyond the fence, now turning gray so fast she could see a little bit of what he’d left there: great big mounds of meat still steaming in the cold, their hides partly dissolved away, large hunks of their manes missing, the meat turned to something like jelly, their teeth protruding from lipless mouths. A couple of Winn Gibson’s prize mares, she suspected. Well, she guessed Ray was just going to have to deal with Winnie on that one, like he had all those times before. She sighed. “Guess you’d best just get inside …”
Jimmie Lee held up the brightly-colored, tattered poster beside his face. “It don’t look much like me, I reckon, but the owner said they had to exaggerate a little bit to draw a crowd. He said people expected it like that, so that it wasn’t lyin’ exactly. They called me the Snake Boy.” The poster showed a giant snake with her son’s lost baby eyes on it, its huge mouth gaped open and an elephant disappearing inside. Lined up into the distance were chickens, bears, and a horse with a huge belly, all with worried looks on their faces.
“That’s very nice, son,” Vivian said quietly.
“But I only stayed there a few months. I didn’t much like people lookin’ at me like that, you know, mama?”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“It was like the way people used to stare at me around here, only worse. Worse ’cause they were strangers, I guess. I never did like strangers watchin’ me while I was eatin’.”
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“It certainly is impolite,” she said. “People shouldn’t stare at other people while they’re eating. You can hardly digest your food that way.” She raised her hand to her throat.
“So that’s why I left the show. I did odd jobs after that, until I got to do those movies I wrote you about. And once for a few months I had me a dandy of a job in one of those meatpacking plants. It was late at night, and I had the place all to myself. It was great.”
“I’m sure it was, Jimmie Lee.”
“But the owner of the sideshow, he really could entertain you. That was a good part of it, mama—it weren’t all bad. He’d crack all these jokes when he introduced me, and then he’d make more of ’em while I did my ‘act,’ but all I did was sit up on that stage and eat. But he’d say these things and all the people would laugh and I reckon that’s a real good thing. He was real funny, mama, you shoulda seen. You’d a laughed till you cried, I bet.”
“I bet I would that, honey.”
“We had ourselves enough show ’round here to last us a lifetime, I reckon.”
Vivian clutched at her apron. She hadn’t heard him come in. She twisted in her chair in time to see Ray throw down his old coat and go stomping off to the bathroom to wash up.
“I guess daddy still don’t want me around here.” Jimmy Lee sat still with his legs spread, long nervous hands dangling and twisting between his knees.
“Your daddy just gets tired, honey. We all get tired now and then.”
She could hear her husband splashing in the water, then hands slapping it onto his face. Jimmie Lee’s eyes were large and white in the dimly lit room. When he was small his eyes always looked like that. Before they discovered the hunger he had, Ray used to joke that Jimmie Lee’s eyes were bigger than his mouth. “I get tired, too,” Jimmie Lee said. “And mama, I still get so hungry.”
Vivian couldn’t move. She stared at her son with tears in her eyes. “I love you, honey. I just keep loving you and loving you.”
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