His friend grunts and continues stirring the mayonnaise.
“You know what they say when some animal gets a taste for human flesh?”
The friend’s blank stare focuses a little and he pulls the fry out of the mayonnaise. He places the fry delicately between his lips and sucks off the mayonnaise before dipping it back into the dish.
“I read some about these tigers in Bombay all ganged up, kilt four hundred people and the natives had to go and call this English hunter name of Laney. He took care of that bitch. Was sick, they said. Something went wrong with it.”
The friend grunts again, “Ain’t nothing wrong with a Keye-Oat been eatin’ babies. In their blood, isn’t it. Scavagers.”
“You mean scavengers.”
“What I said. Nothing wrong.”
The first man shakes his head. “You listen here, I’ll show you something ain’t wrong. You come see what Bill’s boy brought in last night. Not no damn Keye-Oat, I can tell you.”
The friend drags the fry out of the mayonnaise again and sucks it clean. The fry sags down. He lets it fall onto a plate of untouched chicken fried steak and country potatoes.
“When she rose up, all phantom-like and bleeding out from every orifice as if her death was as fresh as a minute ago, I think I shat myself but then it was calm. I saw her bleeding for what it was and I can tell you, it was nothing dangerous or premonitory. It was like a tribute.” Steven lay back on his pillow and sighed deeply. “I can tell you now just how I found her, you’ll be interested, I know. She’s hidden well, but there are certain distinguishing features along the path. A knotted branch, a fern that’s bent and growing up the side of a beech tree, a lot of moss hanging down one side of a boulder, and some beetles rolling dung along a well worn path in the dirt. A circle of mushrooms, a break in the trees where a ray of light shines down and there, she’s just sitting there quiet.”
Dennis scratches his forehead. He can hear the gunshots better from here. A myriad of companion sounds drift in through the barred window: bird calls, the whoops of hunters, the yelps of dogs grazed by bullets. Once sharper than a Fennec Fox’s, Dennis’s ears ping only dully with each successive gunshot. He swallows back panic as Steven turns cataract-speckled eyes on him. “They’re so far out in the forest, Dennis.”
Dennis gulps again, rearranges the chair so he isn’t facing Steven and says, “I know.”
“No one ever goes that far out into the forest, Dennis.”
In one version of events, he watches her soundlessly from the exaggerated afternoon shadow of a lone gas pump as she clambers up the steep sharp steps of a bus clutching a single valise and the bottom of her stomach, thinking she is alone at last, feeling as if she is being watched. Comforted by those invisible eyes like they are the eyes of someone wise and eternal.
It has long been the case that those closest to the wild fear the wild the most. It’s like being in a flood zone. Five miles away from the river, the inevitable flooding seems innocuous. The house is on stilts, you have flood insurance and a canoe. All of your valuables are on the second floor. The children know how to swim. You confront the terror of your world being washed in silty river water with preparedness and calm, every six or seven months, by waxing the canoe and sealing things in Ziploc bags.
When you are eleven feet from the river, you confront the inevitable possibility of flood when you wake to hear the waves lapping on the banks, when you are weeding the garden, when you are making lunch in the kitchen watching the rushing spring snow melt edge up the shore, lap over the sides of the levy, trickle onto the driveway.
Flooding seems much more of a threat when the water is visible from your bedroom window.
This is why Dennis lives in the center of town. Although wilderness surrounds him, he can’t hear it lapping at the banks as well as he used to.
Gloria stands with a stick in her hand on the top of a pile of rocks downstream from the elementary school. Her hair is braided high on her head, her cheeks are pink and vaguely freckly. Her eyes are narrowed into a squint.
She is angry with her mother. Her mother doesn’t understand her. Her mother doesn’t understand anything. Her mother doesn’t even understand her father. Her mother seems like not her mother. She kicks a rock into the river. It bounces on the shallow bottom and pops back up before coming to rest in a deep pool where a small fish bolts away from it, scuttling straight out into the current where it is swept up and out of sight. Gloria wants to read in her room. She wants to back the car down the driveway every day and make breakfast before school. She is smart enough to know what her mother means when she says: “Go find a young boy.” But she will find a young boy the way other girls find young boys. She will find a young boy for her mother.
Just as she was thinking this thought, a boy wielding a stick similar to her own emerges from the tangle of blackberry bushes on the opposite bank. Her first reaction is to think, “Oh boy, it must hurt to walk through all of those prickly bushes,” but this thought is immediately followed by another: “Oh, here we are.”
The boy is shirtless and brown, from dirt or sun it is impossible to tell. Gloria waves to him: “Hey, hey!” but he doesn’t turn to look at her. He is looking upstream, toward the soccer fields of the school on her side of the river. Another boy emerges from the bushes beside him, wearing a black mask and a cape. Soon a third boy and a fourth have joined the first two, one with a horse mask, the other a plastic axe. Gloria waves again, throws a rock into the bushes, and slides down to the water’s edge. “Hey!”
None of the boys turn. Gloria thinks a moment, she examines her clothes, unbuttons her blouse, and hikes her pink denim skirt all the way up to her rib cage. There we go, she thinks. “Hey!” They stare blankly in the direction of the soccer fields. Gloria can’t see what they are staring at from down on the bank, but she doesn’t think she can climb all the way back up. Instead she takes off her shoes and wades out into the water, which is freezing. Feet numbed, she steps out farther. The bottom of the river is soft and slippery. Her left foot slides down one rock and lands with a crack on another. A little translucent cloud of blood blossoms up into the water and is swept off by the current until only a small red thread of fluid trickles out of her heel. It doesn’t hurt, so she continues on. The number of boys has grown while she was struggling across the river. There are seven now on the opposite bank. They are watching her. One of them is laughing, but the rest look sympathetic. She scowls at them and clambers up the steep opposite bank, clutching at blackberry bushes to drag herself up.
A boy with dog ears and a fake plastic nose bends down and offers her a hand. He hoists her up through the blackberries, which drag at her clothes and the skin of her legs. It feels like a bad sunburn. Then before the dog boy has put her on her feet, they take off running in a pack. Gloria is not her PE teacher’s favorite student for nothing, though, and she sprints after them.
He is glad when the sounds of gunshots and stomping boots do not penetrate into the heart of the forest. He feels waves of pressure standing in the claustrophobic silence as panic and frustration swell in his chest. He will never find it, which is distressing. No one will ever find it, which is comforting. His father-in-law has already found it, which is . . . impossible.
The road is slicker than usual. Dennis can feel the wheels slipping beneath him, no traction on the turns. And he keeps seeing bright yellow eyes in the foliage at the side of the road. It is unnerving. They are everywhere, like they say. Maybe those men are right to be out here shooting them. There is obviously some sort of infestation.
Ten miles from the Mackley Park turn-off, he rolls down the window and slows to a crawl. Rain is pinging off the glass and the hood, sizzling slightly as it hits the hot metal. He strains his ears to hear beyond the engine and the tinny sound of rain. A thunderous howling echoes off the sides of the mountain. Thousands of them, still. It is getting dark.
In one version of events, he kills her in the forest, leaving her ripe and swelling body n
aked in the crook of a tree, legs spread to birth into the shadowed and featureless forest an endless series of plagues and pestilences.
Gloria realizes she is falling behind. Her slashed heel starts to sting. Her thorn-whipped legs and arms burn, her sweaty face is beet red and puffy from panting for breath as they bolt up through hills so steep they have to climb on all fours to stay upright. She can still see Dog Ears in the distance, his bare feet kicking up sticks, moss and dirt as he hops through the trees. She is on her knees, one elbow on the ground. Her mother is probably worried; her father will be getting home soon. It seems like a good idea to turn back and it is obvious at this point that she will not be getting any action from these fellows.
Someone at the front stops and turns around. It is Horse Mask. He might be looking at her, although it is hard to tell where his eyes are pointing underneath the mask. She stands up. “I’m leaving, this isn’t fun.” She turns, hoping to make a dramatic exit, but she slips on the hill and skids down several yards on her back. A sound of murmuring grows louder as Dog Ears and another boy clamber after her, sliding through the leaves like snakes.
They grab her arms, one under each elbow, and hoist her up between them. At this distance, they seem much smaller than they did and she is embarrassed. She tries to pull down her skirt a little, to cover her muddy thighs but they are gripping her too tightly and she cannot get her arms free. She writhes and struggles but their small hands are vice-grips, tightening like Chinese finger traps as she struggles.
“Your daughter is at Amelia’s for the weekend,” Kim says without turning as Dennis enters the kitchen. Something unidentifiable is boiling on the stovetop, a sort of greenish paste. Dennis peers into the pot for as long as he can stand before hoisting himself up onto the counter.
“Don’t sit on the counter, Dennis,” his wife snaps. He slides off. There is a moment of silence then she says, “If it wasn’t just down the street, I’d . . .” she shakes her head. Kim spends most of her life shaking her head. “I spent all day at Michael and Karen’s and you won’t believe what the boys have been dragging in off the mountain.”
Dennis grunts, picks at the lip of the counter.
“Don’t pick at that.” Dennis curls his fingers into his palm. “Those animals are so thick up there you can shoot blind and kill twenty. That’s what they’re saying.” Dennis scoffs.
His wife scowls, seems disappointed.
Dennis reaches out a hand to touch her shoulder and she whips it away, splattering the wall with green goop from the stove. “Damn it!”
His wife’s face mutates once again into the black-eyed, pupil-less mask he has seen before. And he knows what is going on.
They are climbing up. The hill steepens under their feet. Gloria’s white tennis shoes are streaked with sap and mud. Young boys float effortlessly over the wasting pine needles around her, ducking in and out of sight, a constantly shifting swarm of masked faces and torn clothing. As they climb they become more ghoulish. They become whiter as darkness drops down over the mountain. Gunshots crack in Gloria’s ears. Up ahead a glimmer of light like a hearth fire.
Dennis picks his way through the foot-deep pulp of decayed newspapers like a gazelle. The door, slick and wet, stands slightly ajar and he pushes it open, wondering if one of the nurses is changing the sheets, dreading the sight of pale grey slacks stretched to amazing proportions by the giant backside of an old nurse. His father-in-law is in love with one of the nurses. Dennis can never remember which one. The man has loved her from the first day. Until the madness set in, she was his one obsession. A voice murmurs in the bedroom as Dennis turns the corner and steps over the carpet sticky and stiff with dried urine and mildew. But when Dennis nudges the door open with the tip of one finger no one is in the room.
“You take her by the hand and lead her to the woods. You take her to the place you knew you all would go. You lie her down and worship her. You take her by the hand and lead her there,” the voice whispers
Dennis’s feet seem locked to the floor. He tries to move, to run, to look around but all he can do is stiffen more. He has lost control of all his muscles. He nearly shits himself before his weakened ears finally hone in on the source of the sound and his feet carry him, breathless, to the window. Under the sill, in the cool sand beside the apartment wall, a small boy with half a Barbie and half a bologna sandwich sits whispering to the sandwich. The Barbie’s butt has been shaved off, a pen puncture through one eye. As Dennis watches from the empty bedroom of his father-in-law, the boy stabs the Barbie with a penknife and whirls around to stare at Dennis.
He hisses like a cat through the false plastic beak of a blackbird. Then he runs, leaving the sandwich and the Barbie behind.
“Dad?”
“There’s a place, son, out back of these woods, far past the other side of this mountain, all the way south. As south as south goes, all downhill, all clear and washed out by fire underneath the trees. In that place a flower grows that’ll only bloom when it gets a breath of fire. The seeds lie dormant until the winds bring the scent of flame and then they start to grow up up up. The seven plagues all come from the bloated belly of one pregnant bitch, son, and that bitch is the earth. The hellish blossom comes and it sweeps across the ground like its own wave of wildfire. Devouring everything that remains. Then in the night its seeds drop into the lush bed of its smothering leaves and they grow swaddled in the warm organic heat of their mother. And when they’re big enough, they come for you. They come for you so hard.”
Kim’s eyes dart from fire to fire, unfocused, looking through the reflection, almost opaque with roosters crowding the furniture in the living room. Her dining room expands into the night, it stretches out parallel to the house, all the way to the mountain where sparks ignite and die, ignite and die. Her child is safe in the kitchen of another mother. Kim imagines her child in the fires, in the night in a vision so vivid and pure that it might be clairvoyance. She gasps and smiles. She chuckles to herself.
Dennis is speeding up the mountain in pursuit of his ancient and demented father-in-law when a blue heron swoops low in front of his windshield. The antennae of the car nicks the bird’s tremendous wing and it crumples mid-flight, into a diminished heap on the side of the highway. Dennis slams on his brakes and backs up. He watches in the rear-view mirror as the bird is smothered in the blackness of night. Then the night around the bird shimmers and the blue heron is covered in blackbirds.
“Where are you my good, sweet girl? Where are you? You led me to your home so many nights, so many nights I followed you while you dreamt and now where are you? My feet are old, I only have a minute and I’m so cold now. Come on and find me, lead me where you know we all must go.”
The boys are skeletons now. Skeletons in plastic masks and overalls so grave-tattered they could be ancient sail cloth or loose thread. They shudder with rasping breath after rasping breath, into the empty body cavity, out of the muscle-less larynx, into the empty body cavity.
“Children . . .”
Gloria shivers in her pink denim skirt and modest cotton bra. Her hair has become the home of four beetles and a white moth, which has mistaken her shimmering golden strands for the winding beams of the moon. The skeleton boys throw her down before a woman who looks very familiar. The woman is breathing through her teeth and alternately gasping and moaning as if in the middle of amazing and invisible intercourse. Beside her is a backpack filled with fruit so molded and mushy that it is only distinguishable by the overpowering smell and a swarm of flies that surround it.
“Children . . .”
Gloria recognizes the woman. She knows the woman.
Gloria throws up suddenly. Her vomit is warm and pink. The woman is Gloria. Gloria is hugely pregnant, her mouth wet and black. She is tied to the base of a tree with a bungee cord that has cut through the fat of her belly to the muscle beneath. The wound is festering.
Gloria’s legs are spread wide and something is crowning. Gloria is staring as something red, vein-sp
eckled and hot steams out of Gloria.
Gloria is screaming. The skeleton boys are rasping skeleton laughter.
The thing crowning is blacker than the night.
When the blackbirds clear, the heron is a collection of small, hollow bones and a single black eye more doleful and sad than any eye still socketed.
“Dad!” Dennis cries into the forest. “Dad! Steve! Steven!” He struggles to listen but the sound of repeated gunfire is almost deafening. Gunfire and howling.
“You have been giving birth for so long, my sweet child. You have been growing them up inside you for a thousand years. Finally, here they come.” Steven rubs his graying hands together, trying to feel the creases and the knuckles again but all he feels is like a few soft mittens, formless and textureless. She is not answering. She is not calling back to him when he calls out. Only coyotes are calling back. He pauses. He thinks. Of course. Only the coyotes are calling back. He sprints into the underbrush toward the howling.
When her grandfather appears beside her, Gloria is alone with Gloria. Gloria is heaving and panting again. The skeletons have all lain down around her like suckling piglets. They slowly rub their small plastic faces up and down her round hot belly.
He kneels but Gloria is too afraid to look at him and then the crowning head rips through the cervix in a shower of afterbirth. It is a blackbird and it is followed by another. And another. And another.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 25
