Kind Nepenthe

by Brockmeyer, Matthew V.

  The slope began to grow steeper as he followed the line and soon he was climbing on all fours, clawing his way up through a dense blanket of fog. He came to another splice in the line and pulled it apart. Still no water. He put the line to his mouth and pulled on it. A flood of foul, brackish water filled his mouth and shot down his throat before he pulled the line away.

  He grew excited for a moment, seeing water gurgle out and thinking he had gotten it going, but then watched with disappointment as the flow slowed to a trickle. He took a deep breath and sucked on the line again. Nasty tasting water was filling his mouth but he could feel something start to give so he swallowed it and continued sucking. Another sudden rush of water, and then nothing.

  Not even a trickle now. Damn it. Something was clogging the line. He put the polypipe down. The taste in his mouth was awful, putrid, and then he realized his tongue was covered in tiny hairs. He spat and scraped his tongue with his fingers, put the line back together, and started back uphill.

  He pulled himself up to the plateau where the tank sat, already feeling queasy from the bellyful of stale water, covered in dirt, with heavy clumps of mud hanging off his knees and elbows. As he lumbered toward the tank, out of breath and exhausted, he caught the ominous smell of something dead and wrinkled his nose. He grasped the line with both hands where it attached to the tank and heaved on it, pulling it free, and was hit in the face with the most godawful stench he had ever smelled in his life.

  Gagging, he stared in horror at what hung out of the pipe

  There, limply dangling from the nipple, was a rat carcass. Just a skeleton really, with ribbons of slimy-gray flesh slinking along the yellow bones and dripping off it. The sight, smell, and taste in his mouth, the feel of all those tiny hairs, overwhelmed him and he leaned over and began vomiting.

  Wiping the tears from his eyes and the puke from his chin, he turned his attention back to the tank.

  He had to unclog the line. He had to do it; so, he took hold of the rat’s neck to pull it free, its rotten skin cold and wet in his hand, and—struggling not to gag, his eyes watering and his guts churning—he gave it a hard yank. His fingers slipped into the soft skin and the skull pulled free from the body, releasing even more of that rank smell. He stumbled backwards and fell. Rolling onto his side, he heaved up mouthfuls of foamy yellow bile.

  How had the thing even gotten in the tank? It was the only other animal besides ravens that he’d even seen at the compound. It didn’t make sense.

  He lay there for what felt like a long time, the rain peppering his face, sticky-wet oak leaves slick beneath his cheek. He could hear the neighbor’s dog barking far in the distance, then gunshots. And fuck if the pattering rain didn’t seem to sound like laughter. His teeth chattered and he pulled himself up into a sitting position and concentrated on breathing. He felt around in the leaves and mud and found a thick, straight stick.

  He turned back to the tank, stepped forward, and, gritting his teeth with resolve, jammed the stick into the rat’s soft carcass, easing it back and forth, feeling the pressure from the water exerting its mass on the other side of the body. Suddenly—with a whoosh of water—the rat’s skeletal remains jetted out of the tank and washed down the hillside.

  He let the entire tank drain. It would fill again; he could hear water from the spring gurgling in already. He could never tell Rebecca about this, he thought, fighting back waves of nausea as he connected the line back to the tank. If she knew, she’d never have anything to do with the water again. One more little secret. Like the pesticide. His nightmare. He thought he heard someone laugh and he looked around quickly. Nothing but forest and fog, the soft patter of pissing rain.

  And then he was stumbling down the steep hillside, engulfed in cloud, trying to keep up with his legs, but they were all tangled up beneath him and he was tumbling. Tumbling and falling and falling and falling through the mist.

  3

  He was in a world of shit and puke, thrashing in it. He wretched, spitting up bile, acrid and hot on his tongue.

  And now the mice were within him. He could feel them burrowing under his skin like slithering parasites, sliding around inside him as he fought to dig them out with his fingers, ripping into this flesh with his nails, reaching in and pulling out one blood-slick creature after another, flinging them away by their moist, pink tails. But there were so many. Too many to ever be free. It felt like he was made of them, composed of them. That he was simply an empty pouch of skin filled with nothing but horrible, squirming, black vermin.

  —

  “Calendula? Calendula? Can you hear me? You had a seizure. We have to get you to the hospital.” Rebecca was there, wiping his face with a rag, her face so twisted up with worry that she looked like a different person. He looked around the room, dazed and blinking.

  “How’d I get here?”

  “I found you. In the rain out back. Having a seizure.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Since yesterday. I was so worried.”

  He rubbed his eyes. He felt…different. Not bad. But definitely different. Rested.

  He yawned.

  “Did you hear me? You had a seizure. We have to get you to the hospital.”

  “No. I’m good. I feel fine.”

  “But you have to see a doctor. Please, I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Have you checked the fuel tank?”

  “No, I haven’t checked the fuel tank. Are you listening to me? You had a goddamn seizure. You were flailing all around, foaming at the mouth. I was scared, Calendula. Scared.”

  “You didn’t check the fuel tank?” He sprung out of bed, surprised to find himself naked. “Jesus, Rebecca, you remember what Coyote said. ‘Don’t ever let the generator run out of diesel.’ It’s our job. Fuck.”

  He pulled on a pair of pants and a T-shirt, Rebecca screaming behind him, “This is crazy. You’re acting insane, Calendula. You have to go to the hospital.”

  “Look, sweetie, chill. Okay? I’m fine. I just, I dunno, I think I hit my head. Okay? But I’m fine now. I promise. I just gotta check the fuel tank.” He kissed the top of her head. “I love you, okay? Thanks for taking care of me, but I gotta get to work.”

  4

  DJ watched the gate swing slowly open, an uneasy feeling stirring in his gut. He had never asked his father to front him crystal before. Had never asked the old man for shit. Had prided himself on it. But an old friend had called asking for serious weight. Two pounds. If he could make this deal happen then he would seriously come up. And if it became a steady thing, he’d be fucking set. He hated the idea of having to ask his father to front him, but the old man was the only one he knew who had that kind of weight. As well as the quality he knew his friend wanted.

  He put the truck in gear and steered it down the gravel drive, the gate swinging shut behind him. The sky was a slate gray, the land devoid of shadow. He tapped the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and ran possible scenarios through his mind.

  He knew the old man wasn’t going to hook him up without a fight. The fucking hypocrite. He loved to rant and rave about what a horrible poison meth was, while at the same time making no secret that he was the biggest dealer on the mountain, with the highest quality merchandise, who had no problem sampling his own supply. It was just a matter of convincing him to hand it over.

  The thick bed of gravel crunched beneath his wheels as DJ eased the truck to a stop in front of the house and pulled the hand brake. He took a deep breath and swung himself out of the truck. As usual, his father’s ugly ass dog was barking its head off and straining against its tether. Knowing how the old man hated it when he let his pants ride down low exposing his boxers, DJ hitched his fi
ngers in his belt loops and pulled them up as he strolled towards the house.

  He entered through the kitchen and found his dad at the kitchen table polishing the bolt head of the Beretta M12 laid out in pieces on a towel in front of him,

  “S’up, Pops?”

  “Keeping my parts lubed. It’s important when you get my age.”

  He let out a long chuckle and shook his head. DJ forced himself to laugh along with him. The old man looked good. Not so wild eyed and strung out. Even his thick mop of orange hair and Grizzly Adams beard cut back and tamed. The police scanner on the counter grumbled with a low hiss of static.

  “You need any pills?” DJ asked, pulling a prescription bottle from his jacket pocket and shaking it so that the pills rattled inside.

  “The old Southern Humboldt mating call. Naw, I’m good, been sleeping like a baby.” He paused, laid down the bolt, squirted a bit of gun oil onto a rag. “Amber might want some, though. If you’re feeling generous.”

  “Sure,” DJ said, sliding into a chair across from him and shaking out a few pills onto the table. “You get a haircut?”

  “Yeah, I let Amber have at me with the scissors.”

  “Looks good.”

  His father scrubbed his face with hands, then cracked open a Budweiser and leaned back in his chair so that it creaked beneath his weight. “Well, I know you didn’t come here just to talk about my hair and give away Xanax. What do you want, kid?”

  “Well, Pops, I need to ask a favor of you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I need you to front me some crystal.”

  The old man just sat there, staring straight ahead for what felt like the longest time, then put down his beer, picked up a long black spring, slipped it into the receiver, and slowly screwed the rear cap back on.

  “What makes you think I’d have any of that crap?”

  “Come on, Pops. I’m not fucking stupid.”

  “I thought you were playing the weed game. What do you want to mess around with that shit for?”

  “Need the money.”

  “So grow some plants.”

  “There ain’t no money in growing no more.”

  “That ain’t true. You just got to put the time and effort into it now. Ain’t easy like the old days. It’s work, but there’s still a lot of money to be made in the pot business.”

  “Even so, I’m going to need me some money for dirt and plants. Fertilizer. Shit, need at least five, six hundred plants. That’s a lot of cash to get them going.”

  “You want me to loan you some cash?”

  “No, Pops, I want to earn it. Come on, front me two pounds.”

  “Two pounds? What makes you even think I’d have that much tweak?”

  “Look around! You don’t seem to be doing so bad. I know you’re up to something.”

  “I’m a certified diesel mechanic.”

  “Don’t give me that, Pops. Shit, when was the last time you worked on an engine?”

  “Yeah, yeah, point taken. I was just hoping you wouldn’t get yourself wrapped up in that. Specially now that you got a kid on the way.”

  “An old friend asked a favor. And I stand to make some good money.”

  DJ silently watched his father finish reassembling the machinegun, sliding the barrel into the bolt and screwing on the front cap, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator and the clink of metal against metal.

  “How well you know this guy?”

  “Known him nearly all my life, Pops. Big T was my best friend all through Middle School. Stand up dude. Great fucking guy.”

  “It’s safe?”

  “Yeah, it’s safe.”

  “Cause that’s a lot of money. I really don’t want you owing me a lot of money. It can make a relationship go…sour.”

  “Ha, don’t I know it. Don’t worry. S’all good. S’all good.”

  “Fuck. I don’t know. Your mother would kill me.”

  “Come on, Pops. I’m a man now. Treat me like one.”

  “Fuck. I guess. Just stay the hell off the crap.”

  “I will. I will.”

  5

  The rains came, pattering the tin roof, streaking the windows so that what tepid light came in was warped and strange. Even when the rain stopped, Rebecca found little comfort in the sky, which seemed perpetually dark and menacing as the days turned into weeks, the weeks into a blur.

  Now that the pot was in full bud, Calendula never seemed to leave the grow room. The points of the serrated, fang-like leaves grew from three to five to seven, and he switched the light cycle from eighteen hours to twelve to initiate flowering. Then the calyxes and hairs began to appear and stack, forming dense clusters of white female flowers.

  The pot wasn’t the only thing changing. Ever since his seizure, despite his first insistence that he was fine, Calendula seemed increasingly sullen and morose. Even when he was around, eating dinner or strumming his guitar, he wasn’t fully present. His mind invariably returned to that hot, humid room full of plants, as though that was where he truly belonged. The grow room had become his home, the plants his family.

  Rebecca began drinking herself to sleep every night. No more organic bottles of pinot noir from biodynamic vineyards: now it was cheap box wines of burgundy and table red.

  Some nights the wine would run out and she’d remove the inner bag from the cardboard box, cutting it open to drain the last few precious drops. And some mornings she would awake, mouth a dirty carpet, a head full of helium, to see a bag cutup and bleeding on the counter and not remember having butchered it.

  She’d take Megan to the little store for supplies and diesel and it seemed the eyes of the clerks and customers at the Last Chance Market began to grow kinder, their suspicious gazes lessening. They knew Rebecca and her little girl now. Maybe they even sympathized, knowing what she was going through. Now they smiled at her, called her dear and hon.

  She was becoming one of them.

  She gave up on eating only organic, non-GMO foods. Now she shopped for whatever was easiest: Pop Tarts, Spaghetti O’s, cans of tuna and peanut butter. She couldn’t seem to find the energy to cook big meals anymore.

  She even thought about cutting off her dreadlocks. They felt fake. Wrong. She didn’t deserve them.

  She found an old tube television in a back closet, a small thing, its screen no bigger than fourteen inches, and a VCR with several boxes of video tapes. She set it on the counter in the kitchen and began watching the tapes: home-recorded sitcoms and soap operas from the early nineties—Friends, Roseanne, Days of Our Lives—complete with ancient commercials for laundry detergents and soaps: smart, sassy moms with mouths of gleaming white teeth. The shows’ theme songs became a source of escape, the old melodies providing a vessel to drift away on as she sipped her wine, Megan beside her clapping her hands and giggling at the nonsense on the screen.

  She thought of the story Megan had told her that long-ago day, the story of the little girl who lived on a boat in the bathtub.

  No, she’s not a princess, Mommy. She’s just a normal little girl.

  A normal little girl whose mother had accidentally set out to sea by pulling the drain plug—was that how it had gone?

  At some point she found herself blearily drunk and trying to concentrate on The Bold and The Beautiful, a bowl of greasy potato chips in front of her. Megan was going bat-shit crazy from being cooped up inside for so long. Screaming at the top of her lungs, racing around the living room, then down the hall, back into the kitchen where Rebecca was trying to watch the little television.

  Megan bounded into the k
itchen, screeching and giggling, leaped up and down several times, pointed under the table, and started singing, “The leaves are all brown! The leaves are all brown!”

  “Megan! Will you please stop?”

  “What, Mommy?”

  “Just stop.”

  “Don’t you like that song?”

  Rebecca returned her focus to the grainy image of a blonde hunk confronting his cheating wife. “I do, sweetie. I do. It’s just…”

  “What?”

  “Well, for one you’ve got the lyrics wrong.”

  “That’s the way he taught it to me.”

  “Who taught it to you that way?”

  “Nobody.”

  “See?” Rebecca’s voice suddenly rose. She was almost screaming. “This is what I’m talking about. Who? Who taught it to you that way? Huh? You’re not making any goddamn sense!”

  Megan stared at Rebecca. Her mouth turned downward and her lower lip began to tremble. Then her entire face crumbled, she began to cry, then turned and ran into the living room.

  Rebecca, feeling her heart crack open, pushed herself from the table and went after her. Scooped her up into her arms.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “So sorry. Are you hungry? Want something to eat?”

  Megan nodded and Rebecca carried her back into the kitchen, sat her down at the table and poured her a bowl of Fruit Loops, splashed some milk into it.

  Megan lapped it up, fluorescent-purple lines of milk spilling from either side of her mouth. “This is yummy, Mommy. How come we never ate this before?”

  Rebecca remembered loving the sweet, crunchy cereal as a child. Watching the commercials for it on Saturday mornings.

  She looked around with a terrible, dawning realization. The gaudy orange of the walls and the 1970s style of the counter and cupboards, the bile-yellow of the linoleum on the floor. The sound of soap opera theme songs coming from the little television. She was a single mother, struggling to survive, her boyfriend gone, weird and absent, her patience for her strange little girl growing tissue thin.