“Excuse me!” he says.
Call the police, this is trespassing and it’s legitimate to call.
Hello, officer? Yes, a badly groomed boy is reading on my bed. Does the National Guard have a spare tank it can send by? This looks dangerous.
He taps again.
“What are you doing in my house?”
Jim shields his eyes against the glare, peering through the dry pane. He watches the man go into the bathroom, fish around in a drawer, come out with a hair dryer. The dryer he uses to dry the henna dye he puts in his beard.
The boy returns with the dryer, points it at the pane the man squints through. Turns it on—he hears it whine.
But he didn’t plug it in.
A patch of fog appears on the glass where it was heated.
No, really, he didn’t plug it in.
Now the boy’s finger traces letters in the fog.
Why didn’t he breathe on the pane?
HAVE YOU
Because he doesn’t breathe.
REALLY
Get in the car.
MADE FRIENDS
Just get in the car figure it out later you’re hypnotized this is dangerous what about the birds and the dryer HE DIDN’T PLUG THE FUCKING DRYER IN! RUN!
WITH DEATH?
When the youth’s finger dots the bottom of the question mark, the windowpane cracks. The professor backs up, backs straight into his nightstand.
He is inside his bedroom now.
Somehow the room and outside switched shell-game fast.
Like teacups, one of them poisoned, in a spy movie.
He feels dizzy.
He sees his breath.
It plumes from his open mouth.
So cold.
He can’t seem to shut his mouth.
None of this is real.
I was just at the store!
He can only gape and shake his head as he watches snow begin to fall from the roof of his bedroom.
52
Andrew appears in the bathroom at Dino’s coffee shop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A fortyish woman sits on the commode next to him, openmouthed, smartphone in hand, confused. He wouldn’t have guessed her as the type to enjoy Angry Birds, but that is in fact what she is playing. She begins to pull her pants up over her knees, moves her mouth as if to form a word. It looks like it’s going to be Who. Before she can speak, however, he smiles disarmingly and says, “I know you’re a bit startled, but there’s nothing to worry about. I’m not actually here.”
“Of course you aren’t,” she says, as if confirming the innocence of a wrongly accused child, and goes back to her game.
Andrew steps into the hallway, shuts the door behind him, peeks into the back room. His friend Eric, an eminently likable red-bearded poet and musician who serves as the unofficial mayor of Yellow Springs, says “Paisan!” when he sees the magus, stands up and gives him a back-slapping, fraternal hug.
“Can I borrow your car for two hours?”
Eric hands him the keys.
• • •
The borrowed car smells like kids.
Andrew loads his bouquet of sunflowers and single bottle of Yuengling into the backseat, next to a toy hammer and a tiny pink sock.
He drives to Enon.
He drives home.
• • •
The sky shines with the kind of bright, sunless gray made to punish hangovers. Luckily, Anneke is nursing hers two states away, and Andrew hasn’t got one. He’s just exhausted.
The Enon cemetery is one of three in Enon; Mud Run and Prairie Knob (behind the Speedway corporate office) are closed now, stacked thick with Civil War–era dead. The Enon cemetery holds a number of these, mostly resting under tombstones, but a few dozen of the white obelisks favored by the nineteenth century’s wealthier dead stick up like fish spines; the largest spire pokes heavenward from atop a hill and reads:
IN MEMORY OF THE PATRIOTS
OF MAD RIVER TOWNSHIP
WHO DIED FOR THE UNION
1865
The second largest remembers one Leander J. M. Baker and his wife, Martha. An Ed Baker’s phallic monument juts nearby, both of these overtopping a sextet of smaller spires in the foreground, all belonging to the fun-loving Funderburghs. Andrew follows a sort of reverse Mohawk of shorter, darker monuments plowed between the old obelisks and tombstones, these dating from the middle eighties when it was decided to eliminate the walkway that used to bisect this part of the boneyard and to start planting Enonites between their forefathers.
Andrew kneels before and kisses his mother’s small stone, then lays his armful of sunflowers down, not bothering with a pot or water. This was how his mom left flowers for Grampa John Standingcorn.
The flowers are for the dead, not the living. All these folks who stand ’em up in water’s just showing off. Sooner these flowers brown, the sooner Grampa gets ’em.
ELIZABETH
STANDINGCORN
BLANKENSHIP
The letters crowd awkwardly on the pinkish-gray stone, and he furrows his brow remembering the fight he had with his brother about including their mother’s Shawnee maiden name.
She never went by that. It’s too long. And it’s not Christian.
He sees Charley standing in front of him, pointing a finger for each of these arguments until he has made a proper pitchfork of his hand, the irony lost on him.
Charles Stewart Blankenship doesn’t do irony.
He also doesn’t do follow-up, which was why Andrew’s last-minute call to the monument company decided the Standingcorn matter.
Charley hates his Indian blood and probably thanks his beefy white Jesus every night that he inherited his father’s pink tones and brown hair and left Andrew with the nutshell complexion and inky black mane of his grandfather.
Charley wants nothing to do with his “occult-dabbling” Indian-looking brother.
The elder Blankenship sibling has made himself rich on a series of instructional CDs about how to make oneself rich. With Jesus. It’s called The Catch, and it tells the listener how to focus concentration and will on making wealth appear. To say certain ritualistic things every day and to believe and visualize. To implore the Fisherman for a bountiful catch.
It works.
At least, it does for Charley, who is mildly luminous.
And probably for anybody else who is, too.
That his magic-hating older brother has made himself a millionaire by unwittingly practicing low-grade magic is one of the most beautiful ironies Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is aware of.
Charley would argue that it’s not magic because he calls on Jesus to make the money roll in. Andrew doesn’t know much about Jesus, if there is a Jesus, but he doubts that the guy who said it was easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven would be shoveling Benjamins at his believers.
Charley is tone-deaf to hypocrisy.
Charley doesn’t do irony.
Their shared father did, though.
Their father the cop, the actual fisherman, not of men or Benjamins, but of river trout.
Andrew opens the Yuengling and pours it into the grass before the stone just next to Elizabeth’s, which says simply:
GEORGE
BLANKENSHIP
“Sorry it’s warm, Dad.”
• • •
He drives Eric’s car a few blocks from the cemetery, parks it on Indian Drive just off the roundabout that encloses the mound. The mound is Adena Indian, not Shawnee; the Adena were all done here by the time Jesus popped his first pimple.
He hops the little fence around the base of it, remembering how irreverent he and the other kids were to it, how he dubbed it the “earth boob,” smoked his first joint on it on a moonless night in November 1975, its three trees holding on to the year’s last l
eaves. That wasn’t so bad, but then he took a good long piss against one of those trees to make his friends laugh.
They did, but they didn’t mean it.
He made himself laugh, too.
He remembers the dream he had that night. He was tied to the tree he had pissed on and a man with actual strawberries for eyes danced around him, periodically jabbing at his face with a dead porcupine on the end of a spear. The porcupine smelled rank. He was sure he would be blinded by a final, decisive thrust, and then, suddenly, painfully, he was. Apparently he had not fully voided his bladder earlier, because he woke up in cold, pissy sheets.
He never urinated on the Adena burial mound again.
• • •
He just sits there for ten minutes.
The sun warm on his face.
Warmer here than in New York.
And then he goes.
53
Haint’s picture comes up on Andrew’s phone.
He’s smiling, leering toothily at the camera on his computer.
Standing far enough away so Andrew can see around him, behind him—he gets his best view to date of Haint’s portable apartment.
The dreddy violin player lounges behind the hoodoo man, smoking an immense, poorly rolled joint that looks like it wants to fall apart. An iguana watches from the arm of the sofa, serenity made flesh. Bricks behind the couch, a shelf with an altar of sorts, big leather Bible, a jar of dice. Candles. Four Thieves vinegar. Junk-sculpture art on the walls. The most clearly visible piece looks like an iron sun—chains of different gauges and states of oxidization arranged in rows forming a ferrous circle, at the center of which hangs a malign, rusted bear trap, cocked and ready.
Isn’t hard to guess what that thing does if the wrong person comes in.
Neither Haint nor Andrew speaks for a moment.
“I like it that you don’t say hello. You’re waitin’ for news and that’s all you want to hear, and anything else is bullshit.”
Andrew blinks his icon eyes, feels the stirrings of elation; Haint seems pleased with himself. He has good news.
Could it be?
Haint holds up a lambskin covered in dried blood, a smile-shaped gash letting a flap of it hang. Haint begins to dance, showing off the skin, then begins to sing.
“Ding-dong, your bitch is dead, she’s really dead, I killed her dead, ding-dong, your Russian bitch is deeeeeeaaad.”
The man on the couch blinks through the cannabis smoke wreathing his head, as if it has only just occurred to him that his eccentric host might really kill people. He seems to reject the idea, takes another puff, leans close to exhale his smoke in the iguana’s face. As if doing it a favor. Only makes it blink.
Andrew’s heart is racing; his breath comes in little hitches. He remembers the hut, the last time he thought she was dead. The ancient, ghoulish thing. You don’t get ancient being killed easily, but this is a new age. Technology just might have made her vulnerable. Haint’s cursed Ephesian knife married to satellite photography, swooping down like some drone’s missile to kill the witch in her own garden.
Help me, bomber!
He pushes his old fear down, clings to the hope Haint offers him. The evidence on the skin.
So much of it.
“You’re sure?”
Haint doesn’t speak.
Then he does.
“That little smudge there, that’s my blood, to prime the knife. The rest of this, all of this, come outta her. I seen it in my mind. She was hunchin’ in her garden, digging up a turnip or something, and she didn’t even see the shine on the knife blade. Not that there was much shine, man, that’s some hunka deep dark woods. But I went zip and she went gaa! And it wasn’t no harder than this—”
So saying, he lunges fluidly backward, plucks up the iguana by the tail and whips it hard against the floor, holding it up so Andrew can see its last spasms. He forces himself not to show disgust in his eyes, his calm eyes. The dreddy man is not so poised. Haint’s speed and brutality have startled him, made him drop the spliff all over himself, burn himself, say “FUCK, man!”
“FUCK, man!” Haint mocks him, throwing the limp reptile on him now, causing the musician to leap to his feet, still swatting at the ember on his pants.
Drops of blood from the lizard’s head have spotted his T-shirt.
“Not COOL!” he says, looking less frightened than he should be.
This is so much worse than not cool!
Get out of there!
Haint looks at Andrew, eyebrows comically raised as if to say, Can you believe this guy?
“Verify, then bring the hand,” he tells Andrew.
Sounding happy with himself.
Andrew nods.
Should turn off his phone but can’t.
This is a user’s biggest weakness: the need to know what happens, how things work, to see what others don’t get to, no matter how cruel and ugly it is. Especially if it’s cruel and ugly.
The dreddy man gathers up his canvas bag, stomps off behind Haint, then stomps back in the other direction.
“Where’s the fucking door?” he says.
Haint raises his eyebrows again.
Rubs his hand front-to-back along the neatly scarred ridges of his scalp.
Turns off the camera.
Leaves the sound on.
Knows Andrew will listen.
Is doing this for Andrew because he likes him and wants him awed and uncomfortable and repulsed.
Haint only respects other users.
“Are you really telling me what’s cool and what’s not cool in MY house?”
“Just where’s the door, I’m outta here.”
“You THINK you’re outta here, but you ain’t gone yet.”
“Look, we’re good, man, I just want the door.”
“We ain’t good, man. It’s my door, man, and you only gonna use it when I say so.”
“Put that down.”
Andrew’s finger hovers over the end call button, but of course he can’t press it.
“There you go, tellin’ me what to do in my house . . .”
They speak over each other.
“Please, just . . .”
“In MY fuckin’ HOUSE!”
“I want to go . . .”
“A man’s home is my castle, and you are in my CASTLE . . .”
“Okay, okay, calm down . . . I mean let’s . . .”
“And in my CASTLE, you do not refuse my HOSPITALITY.”
“Okay, please don’t . . .”
“Eat it.”
Silence.
“I like your cookin’ and I like your playin’ so Imma give you this chance. Imma make the door come back and let you outta here if you eat this motherfucker. All of it.”
“Please.”
“PLEASE NOTHIN’ I AIN’T IN THE PLEASE BUSINESS YOU EAT THAT FUCKIN’ THING.”
Silence.
“Here’s some hot sauce.”
Call ended.
PART THREE
54
Michael Rudnick drives his old pickup truck to Anneke’s house, following a small, golden finch. It perches in trees near the turns he’s supposed to take, flutters around and flies on to the next turn. The birds he charms to guide him fall behind him on the interstates, but he doesn’t need them on the interstates. Maps work just fine there. He only calls a guide bird on the sort of rural roads so many American users choose to live near. Users are a solitary breed, after all, more big cat than wolf.
“Andy was right. You do look like a lion. I’m Michael Rudnick. Mike’s fine.”
Anneke stands on her front porch, perplexed.
She only got the text this morning.
Andrew B-ship
MAN WHO WROTE THE STONE BOOK COMING TO MENTOR YOU. LET HIM IN. HE’S THE REAL THING.
Mike Rudnick offers his big, tough hand and she allows it to swallow hers.
Tough, callused hands with small thick nails.
Worker’s hands, not reader’s hands.
And he’s had so much sun on him that the white in his mostly white beard almost glows. He looks like a less self-indulgent Hemingway, harder and leaner. Michael Rudnick is the last guy you’d look at and think user. He carries himself like a rancher, or maybe a circus man—someone who works with large animals and makes them do what he wants because that’s the only way.
He looks seventy.
“Nobody calls him Andy,” she says.
He ignores this, except to smile at it. Paternally, somewhat amused. She’s not sure she likes him.
She’s not sure she doesn’t.
But still.
A bird sings.
What the fuck was Andrew thinking, sending this old geezer here like some kind of replacement dad?
She knows she’s surly, knows the booze does that, feels good and surly anyway.
His truck cools.
Her hangover throbs like a bass line to the duet of chirping finch and ticking truck.
“So you’re good with minerals.”
“I sculpt.”
“That’s something. That’s really something. I sculpt, too. May I see?”
“Uh . . . now’s not . . .”
“Pottery, too, right? Mugs. Cups.”
“You know, I’m not sure this is going to work. This is a bad time for me.”
“It’s actually a good time.”
She blinks twice.
The balls on him!
“Says who?”
“Grief is a catalyst for magic. We get growth spurts when we’re hurting, and the worse we’re hurting the faster we might grow. If we push it.”
She looks at him, her mouth opening a little but not settling on a word. Her teeth are still dark from last night’s boxed wine, a thin line of dried cab/merlot circumnavigating her lips.
She looks rough and knows it.
Remembers spitting into the toilet last night, her spit nearly black from tobacco and wine.
He takes her hand again; she almost pulls it away but doesn’t. With his other hand he pulls a small pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. Inspects her hand, looking for calluses. Like it’s a tool he might buy if the price is right.
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