by phuc
I don’t know if it was that drink Uncle Skad had made for me or if it was just being there, talking to him, but my head was reeling. I felt great. The entire time I told my story to Uncle Skad, he looked completely absorbed in what I was saying. I think it was more his electric stare that made me feel a little better. Looking at Uncle Skad, a strange blue glow emanated from him.
I lay down on the couch, an uncontrollable smile spreading itself across my face.
I felt like a dope. I felt like the Cheshire Cat and, what was most amazing, for awhile, I didn’t feel many feelings at all.
“Perhaps I should wait until tomorrow to tell my tale, Mr. Black.”
“No, no, I want to hear it. It’ll be a bedtime story.”
Uncle Skad’s eyes twinkled. “I’ve never had someone to tell a bedtime story to.”
“One night only!” I shouted.
“One night only!” Uncle Skad agreed. “One night only! Ladies and gentlemen, Wallace Black!”
“Pipe down, goddammit!” Dr. Blast hollered from the back.
I laughed. “Begin. Begin already,” I pleaded. My head really was spinning.
Uncle Skad stood up from the floor, where he had sat listening so intently to my story.
“First I’m going to freshen up the old glass, friend. Need any more remedy?”
“No thanks.” His remedy still felt like it was punching the fuck out of my rectum.
Skad walked to the back of the house and I lay there on the couch, listening to the shuffling and clinking. Dr. Blast grunted deeply and muttered, “You’re standing... on my head, you old troll.”
“Sorry,” Skad said.
Skad came back with his drink, scooted an old chair closer to the couch, and sat down on the edge. I watched him move, nearly hypnotized, as he dragged that blue light around with him. The light seemed to be gaining some sharpness of color, lingering in the air behind him a little bit longer. He sat down on the edge of the chair and scratched his beard with thick grime-covered fingers. His fingernails were thick and yellow. They reminded me of Fritos. A roach crept out of his beard and scurried up his cheek. He casually flicked it away and began his story.
He rocked constantly as he talked, the speed gaining momentum with his story, and continued making wildly dramatic gestures with his hands, sending that blue all around him. My weightless spirit had returned sometime while I was talking to Skad and I found myself sitting up on the couch and, at times, even whipping my augmented head from shoulder to shoulder. This didn’t faze Uncle Skad, though. He knew I was hearing every word he said. At times I would also snap my fingers and I swear Uncle Skad was almost able to time his story to those snaps.
It was then, as Skad told his story, that I suspected him of being much crazier than I was and much crazier than I’d first suspected him of being. Except for his living quarters, he had previously seemed like a sane and rational human being. There was even sort of a determinist sanity to his house.
He began his story with his birth, stating that he was fully conscious and aware from the moment he slid from his mother’s womb. He knew this would give him problems later on. From the night he was taken home, his mother (my grandmother, I guess) was wickedly mean to him. She would spend the rest of her life denying she was wickedly mean to him, thinking there was no possible way he could remember any of that fuckness. He had a normal childhood, although he was watched the entire time. Skad said he was well aware of the high volume of airplanes and helicopters that flew overhead, monitoring him while he tried to play outside. When his mother started buying televisions for every room in the house, he realized someone was watching him through those, as well. There were a number of times when he could hear the spies bumbling behind the walls or catch glimpses of them in the mirror.
As Skad grew older, he refused to eat the same food twice, so those people watching him wouldn’t pick up his dietary habits and find an easy way to poison him.
This had him eating a lot of odd things. You know all those things you see in cans and jars of sickening color at the supermarket—the things that seemed reserved for either the biggest bumpkins or the most pretentious gourmet? Skad had tried them all: from caviar down to pickled pig’s feet. He said this strange diet allowed him to keep a totally open mind and avoid any sort of favoritism that would cripple him when he got his first job—
the King of Pung.
Apparently, Pung was a very small island nation somewhere in the Pacific Rim and Uncle Skad was able to run this country through the mail. At that point, he launched into a lengthy comparison of political structures. I heard the words, but most of the concepts eluded me. I’ve never cared much for politics. Eventually, he was dethroned.
The airplanes and the television learned he wasn’t observing an honored Pung tradition that consisted of shaving off all the body hair, on a daily basis, and saving it in pillowcases.
“I’m just an incredibly hairy motherfucker,” Skad said. “I simply found the ritual too exhausting and painful to carry on with.”
After this failure, Skad was convinced he spent four years in hell. Until then, he never really believed in the concept of a hell. I interrupted him to ask if he ever got to meet Satan, but Skad said no one ever sees him “down there” because he is on earth doing his work. He was still not fully convinced of hell in the traditional sense of the word. “It’s all trickery,” he said. “A lot of aluminum foil and high-powered sun lamps is all. The demons are just monkeys in costume.”
His sentence served, he came back to the surface and became a photographer. He became quite successful at this before being busted on charges of pornography. Skad said he still isn’t sure what was pornographic about his work and, what with the laws and all, it was impossible to find out.
There were a number of other things about Skad’s life that he wouldn’t tell me, saying they were “Top Secret.”
“For instance,” he said. “I invented something that has become so commonplace you couldn’t imagine that someone had to invent it. Something as seemingly necessary as a pair of pants or a chair. But, when I was bought out, the corporation forbade me to talk about it. Sometime when it’s just you and me, Wally boy, I’ll tell you all about it but, you know, I’m in a compromising situation here.” He gestured to the cockroaches littered around him. And they truly were everywhere.
He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook them over his hand. A roach clicked out onto his palm, wet and glistening. He reached his fingers in to pull out a cigarette and got up to light it over the barrel.
The Tar District, in short, was where Skad ended up. He said it made him sad that nobody in the Tar District had anything to their names. How they had all been reduced to nothing. “But these people here aren’t the ones who are reduced to nothing,” he said.
“When people give up their souls for more and more and more, that’s when people are reduced to nothing. I choose to live in the Tar District. If you ever want to know the true nature of your soul, you’ll live in complete and total poverty. Poverty makes people do things that maybe they didn’t think were possible. There are a lot of people who are capable of performing great works, either to enrich their lives in the simplest way they know how, or to try and bring themselves up out of poverty. Others find themselves capable of the worst possible deeds when they crack under the pressures of poverty. The people in the Tar District manage to live incredibly full lives. When you find that everything you’re doing is done to stay alive it tends to give you a renewed sense of purpose in life.”
By the time he was finished, I was very excited and very tired. I shouted,
“Hooray, Uncle Skad!” for no reason other than it seemed like a good thing to say. I doubted everything he said was true but, then again, he was glowing and most people would have a hard time believing that. I decided some people live a very real kind of life in their heads. More than anything, I decided I was very tired. I’d done too much of everything that day. I lay down on my back and started spiraling dow
n into sleep.
Skad’s voice sounded like it came from very far away. “You sleep tight Wally Black.” Then he laughed and said, “May your dreams melt away those awful horns. You sleep tight.”
Chapter Eighteen
Skad’s Invention
I woke up on the couch and slowly raised my head, expecting the grinding bonefeel to be there. There was no pain at all. All over my body, every trace of stiffness and soreness was gone. Hoping Skad’s magic drink had other effects, I raised my hand to feel along the top of my head, but the horns were still there. Happy to be pain free once again, I flung myself off the couch and landed on my feet.
Uncle Skad was already awake.
“You get out of the bed the same way I do,” he said.
“Yeah, it really gets me started.”
“Come out on the deck with Dr. Blast and I.”
I followed Skad through the dim house. He swung the back door open and we went out onto the sagging deck. Standing dangerously close to the far edge of the small deck, I was able to look straight down at the greasy Saints River. Dr. Blast sat in a black soot-covered plastic porch chair, balancing a stained coffee mug on his knee. The Sad Hump was gone. The morning was bright and as clear as Milltown got.
Dr. Blast squinted up at me. “Good morning, Wally,” he said.
“Good morning, Dr. Blast. Your hump’s gone.”
“Strangest thing. I had a wonderful dream last night. It lifted the sadness right away. It’s Saturday morning, the sun is out, and I’m going to go home to my wife and kids. We’ll take a drive in the country and I’ll make them listen to Benny Goodman on the car stereo.”
“What time is it, anyway?”
Uncle Skad looked around. “I have no idea of the exact time. Minutes and seconds are so restrictive. I’m guessing it’s early.”
“Early,” I reiterated.
“Are you hungry?”
“Sure.”
“Let’s me and you fix us something to eat. I’ve decided that you are on a journey, Wally. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to help you. Due to legal restrictions, I can’t take you wherever you need to go but I’ll take you as far as I can.”
“I just want to get out of Milltown.”
“Oh, getting out of Milltown’s no problem. We can be out of here in no time at all.”
“Thanks, Uncle Skad.”
“I notice your shoes are looking a little worn.”
“Yeah, I’ve had them for a couple of years.”
“Looks like you’ve grown right out of them. Let me see what I can find.”
“That’d be great.”
“For now, though, I must find food.”
“Well, I better be going,” Dr. Blast said and then we were all standing up, our faces grimed with the soot sediment that poured out of the barrel.
Nobody said anything. There were a few moments of uncomfortable shifting and we all went back into the house. Skad and Dr. Blast raced for the front door, both of them slamming out of it and leaving me standing there in the dim house.
I felt good. Yesterday’s miseries had faded away. The house was almost dark.
Black plastic had been nailed over all the windows but the morning sunlight came in through all the cracks and holes in the ceiling and walls, pressing inward through the wads of paper shoved in there to keep the wind and as much of the rain as possible out.
I sat down and watched the cockroaches. Our house back on Walnut had the occasional roach or two. The mother said that was because we lived by train tracks or the plumbing was old or some fuckness like that. Those cockroaches at home never made themselves visible during the daylight. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, if I went into the kitchen and threw on a light, I’d see one or two of them scurry to some dark area.
Apparently, the more roaches there were, the more brazen they became. Uncle Skad’s roaches shuffled slowly around on the floor as though they had as much right to this place as Uncle Skad. I got bored, I guess. It never really did take much for me to get bored. I reached down and managed to grab a couple of the roaches. I found a clear spot on the floor, no easy task, and sat them down side by side, hoping they would race. They were slow to move at first and, once they did, my plans were completely foiled. They sprouted off into two opposite directions like the concept of a contest was completely foreign to them. I watched as they each went to join their separate packs.
It wasn’t long before Uncle Skad came back. Bundled in his arms were a loaf of bread, a carton of eggs, a few cheese slices and a pair of shoes. He slammed the door behind him and, breathing quickly, made his way to the back of the house where he dumped his finds.
“I still think they might be trying to poison me so now I just borrow food from other people. I went over to see if old Otto had any food and, strangest thing, old Otto’s dead.”
There was an old, woodburning stove back there. Skad swung the small iron door open, stuffed some newspapers and old boards in there, and lit it up. “Unbelievable, he was just sprawled out there in the middle of the floor.” He held a hand over the stove’s surface to see if it was getting warm. “That’s where I got the shoes. Looked like he was about a size ten, so these might be a little small for you but they have to be better than what you have now.” He dug underneath the stove and cracked a couple eggs over it.
“See, most of these houses here in the Tar District are actually condemned. No one’s really supposed to be living in them. What happens is that, whenever someone dies, we make use of whatever resources we can so no traces are left behind. Old Otto’s place didn’t look too picked over. I’m guessing he died sometime last night. Possibly the night before. As for the bodies, those usually disappear. It is my assumption that some master chef here in the Tar District can probably cook up a mean leg of human. How do egg sandwiches sound?”
“Anything is fine.”
Uncle Skad went about making the food over the small stove. I sat on the couch, the greasy smells flooding my senses. My stomach rumbled. Sitting there, I ran my fingers over my face, feeling its new lumpy form. I was sure my nose was broken. It didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t really breathe through it very well. Up to that point, I had tried not to be a mouth breather. Mainly so people wouldn’t look at me right off the bat and assume I was even dumber than I really was. I mean, I spent a lot of time just fazing out and staring off into space anyway. Now I figured I’d be doing that with my mouth open, also. People would walk by and interrupt my daydreaming to ask if I was trying to catch flies. Fuck them, I thought.
Skad brought me the egg and cheese sandwich on a folded up piece of newspaper.
The grease had already soggied the paper. I hungrily went about devouring the sandwich.
I had gone all day yesterday without eating a thing and that sandwich tasted like the best thing I’d eaten in I don’t know how long. My mouth watered and my stomach made deep gurgling sounds as it disintegrated the food.
We both finished our sandwiches quickly and threw the greasy newspapers in the barrel. A satisfying belch forced its way out of my throat and I retasted breakfast. We sat in silence for a few moments, both of us digesting. Uncle Skad lit another one of his cigarettes. It smelled like a campfire.
Skad finished his cigarette and looked at me contemplatively, cocking his head from one side to the other, studying the horns.
“Those things have been in our family for years. I think they were passed down from our grandfather. No one really knew where they came from, like what kind of horns they are or anything. We used to play with them as kids. I didn’t know what had happened to them. I guess Sadie took them, huh?” He quietly studied me again and then said, real out of the blue, “You know, Wally, even though I think they add a good deal of flair and character, I can tell by the look in your eyes that you would sooner live without those egregious horns.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just... well, I have a hard time fitting in anyway.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
He
went into the back of the house. I was beginning to realize anything of importance was located in the back of the house. He returned with a small box.
“Let me see one of those horns,” he said.
I proffered my head toward him. He moved my hair around and felt around the base of one of the horns with his fingers.
“What’d she do, super glue the suckers on there?”
“No, they had a strap but it came off when I tried to unbuckle it.”
“Like magic.”
“I guess.”
He gave the horn a little tug, trying to work it back and forth.
“That kind of hurts,” I said.
“Yeah, they’re in there pretty good. Guess I’ll have to try another way.”
Skad fished through the little cardboard box and pulled out a piece of sandpaper.
He ran a finger along the surface, testing the texture. Holding the square of paper in the palm of his hand, he began rubbing it around in circles on the top of the left horn. There wasn’t any feeling in the horn but, I guess with them actually being attached to my head, the scratching sound of that sandpaper sounded like he was scraping at my ear. The dust from the powdering of the horn settled on the back of my neck. I guess I kind of got my hopes up. I imagined the horns would be little more than nubbins in an hour.
But there was no progress to be made.
“My God,” Skad said. “This could take days. Those horns are dense little objects.
You know what?”
“What?”
“Maybe the horns were just meant to stay on.”
“I hope not.”
But Skad had echoed my thoughts exactly. Maybe the horns were meant to stay on. And what if they were? My life had already been filled with fuckness, the horns could only assure the rest of my life would be filled with the same kind of fuckness and, most probably, even more fuckness than I’d previously ever experienced. If the horns were meant to stay on, then it wouldn’t matter how well I could act. If I ever grew out of my awkward stage and learned how to stop twitching and hooting, the horns would ensure that I would always remain an outcast. The horns would become my poverty. What I said before about never being able to get rid of the poor would be the same thing. Like whenever a poor person actually made something of himself, there’s always someone standing around and saying, “Can you imagine, he used to be so poor?” I could be the well-behaved boy with horns. The well- dressed boy with horns. The smart boy with horns. But I would still be the boy with horns.
