Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I stood, forgetting I was supposed to be watching for some wavery version of headlights in front of the house.

  Had it been a feather that brushed the skin of my back? The ermine cuff of a fancy moccasin? The lightest brush of a porcupine quill from a bustle?

  Had my dad reached down with his fingertips to touch the back of his oldest son, because that was the most he could do?

  I reached my hand as far around as I could.

  Another thing I’d learned at school, it was “canteen kiss.” It’s when you drink after a girl you like, or she drinks after you.

  This was like that, I guess.

  If my dad had touched me, then there was some kind of countdown where I could touch where he’d touched, and it would matter.

  It was two fifty. Then it was three. I had school the next morning.

  I policed my area, being sure there was no evidence of my nocturnal activities—no explanation would cover me out here, mostly naked with a jump rope and a prayer—and walked the uncreaky parts of the floor back to my room, stopping to check on Dino for good measure.

  He was spasming in his bed.

  It wasn’t the first time.

  Mom swore she’d not had a drop of anything while carrying him, but still, and lately more and worse, he was kind of . . . It was like there was something in his head not quite making a complete connection. Like the way he wasn’t learning his numbers or his letters when, by the third grade, he definitely should have. The school had him on some special learning plan already, but there was talk of special classes now, and special teachers that talk so soft and nice it’s terrifying, like they’re about to eat you.

  At the bus stop, if I didn’t stop it, the other kids would push him back and forth between them like playing pinball. And Dino didn’t mind. He liked being part of the game, I think.

  The last month or two, though, he’d started zoning out in the middle of meals, or while watching a game show, or just while standing looking out a window.

  And now this.

  “Mom,” I called out, just loud enough to wake her, not loud enough that she’d hurt herself trying to crash down the hall, “Dino’s having another seizure.”

  This would be his fifth or sixth. That we knew about.

  By the time Mom got there with the warm rag she was sure helped, I had the leg of one of Dino’s superhero action figures between his teeth. In the Western movies, they always use a belt or a wallet in the mouth. It’s never for a seizure, it’s usually for a bullet, but the principle’s the same, I figured.

  After a few minutes of it, Dino settled down.

  I stood to go to bed.

  “What were you doing up with that?” Mom said.

  I looked down to the jump rope evidently still hanging around my neck.

  “Water,” I lied, like that was any kind of explanation, and then made good on that lie, felt my way to the sink.

  On the way back across the linoleum of the kitchen, my bare foot kicked something that rocketed away. Something light and plastic and round.

  My heart registered it the moment it hit the wall under the table, and then my hands reacted just about the exact instant it tapped against the roulette wheel of the heater vent in the floor.

  My mouth named it while it was still falling down that ductwork: “Bead.”

  One single bead.

  It was as big as the whole rest of the world.

  * * *

  After school, I held Dino’s hand as soon as the bus pulled far enough away. If anybody saw, it wouldn’t help his cause any, I didn’t think. Probably not mine either, but I at least had the idea—mostly from action movies—that I could go wolverine, fight my way out of any dogpile of bodies.

  This is something all Indians think, I think: that, yeah, we got colonized, yeah, we got all our lands stolen, yeah yeah yeah, all that usual stuff. But still, inside us, hiding—no, hibernating, waiting, curled up, is some Crazy Horse kind of fighter. Some killer who’s smart and wily and wears a secret medicine shirt that actually works.

  Just, if you say this to anybody, you kill that Crazy Horse you’re hiding inside.

  So, you walk around with this knowledge that he’s there if you ever need him.

  But, also, you try not to need him. You wait till the bus is a plume of dust before taking your little brother’s hand in yours while you both walk past the neighbor’s house. It’s a ramshackle affair that might have been a tack shed originally, or maybe a camper with the wheels buried. There’s chainlink all around the property, and that’s usually high enough to keep his four dogs in. Dino walking in his jerky way, though, that activates whatever predator instincts those dogs still have, and they come at the chainlink hard, sometimes even bloody their face on it.

  Me holding his hand, it was keeping his jerkiness under wraps, so the dogs just barked, didn’t gear down into killer-snarl mode.

  Again, we made it, and, to prove to Dino that we’re not complete wimps, right at the end of the chainlink, I started making a hurt-rabbit sound in my throat, so that my mouth didn’t move—so that anybody in that ramshackle tar-paper house with the three galvanized chimneys wouldn’t see that I’m doing anything.

  But the dogs knew.

  They exploded against the fence but it was taller at the corner, from the remains of what had probably been a chicken coop back in 1910, and that was all they could do: bark. If they knew to double back, they could have cleared the fence, hamstrung us halfway to our porch, have a midafternoon kidmeat feast. But dogs are stupid.

  Anyway, it was Mom who hamstrung us.

  She was waiting, wasn’t at work.

  She ran out to scoop us up, was enough of a surprise in the middle of the day that I had to swallow that hurt-rabbit sound and kind of go limp, let her pack us into the back seat of our big heavy car.

  What happened, she explained, driving and smoking, it was that in the breakroom at her work, one of the other mom’s kids had turned up sick at school, so he was at work with her, was wrapped in a blanket watching cartoons. The first thing this meant was Mom couldn’t catch the last fifteen minutes of the soap opera she claimed not to care about, really. The second thing this meant was that, tapping ashes into the big brass ashtray of the breakroom, she was now watching a whole new set of commercials. Ones targeted at an audience into robots and dinosaurs and fighter planes, not vitamins and hygiene and vacations.

  What this meant was that she ended up tracking the movements of an action figure on screen, and that cued up last night for her, Dino’s seizure in his bed, and then she was leaving her cigarette curling up smoke from the ashtray. She didn’t even clock out, just raced straight home to wait on the porch for us.

  Because she knew.

  I’m not saying she was the perfect mom, but she would always pick us over whatever else there was. When we left the reservation, it was for me and Dino. Not for her. Unlike Dad, she wasn’t still living her high school years five years after high school. But she did have her own sisters, and one brother still alive, and aunts and uncles and cousins and the rest, kind of like a net she could fall back into, if she ever needed them all.

  But she cashed all that in. Because, she said, she didn’t want either one of us drowning in water we didn’t have to drown in, someday.

  Only, now, one of us, he was malfunctioning. And she was the only one who could run him to the doctor in the middle of the day.

  We had to sit in the waiting room nearly until dinner, but the emergency room finally took Dino back to x-ray his third-grade body. Not for whatever misfire was making him zone out and seize up—that had to be in his head—but for the superhero foot Mom knew would be there. In the breakroom at work, she’d flashed on the action figure I’d had him bite down on. It was lying beside him in bed once he calmed down. And it had been missing one red boot.

  In the breakroom, I spent all three of the dollars Mom had left, ate two honey buns and one hot chocolate from the coffee machine. I sprinkled grainy sugar from the coffee tab
le onto the second honey bun, then, hours later, walking across the parking lot holding Mom’s hand, I threw up right in front of a parked ambulance and couldn’t understand what was going on.

  Mom tried to pull me away from the vomit—puley honey-bun paste, runneled through with dark chocolate veins—but I pulled back, studied it, trying to make a deal: I would throw up that superhero boot for Dino. Please. It was my fault, anyway.

  That’s not how the world works.

  Dino was supposed to just keep eating like normal and wait to find that piece of plastic in the toilet. We didn’t have to watch for it, though. We could, the doctor had said, but really, the sign that it had hung up somewhere, it would be Dino’s appetite fading.

  Except—what if his appetite started to go away because of whatever was happening in his head, to keep him from learning his numbers?

  Mom was out of cigarettes, so she held on to the steering wheel with both hands and didn’t look into the back seat, even with the mirror.

  After lights out, still trying to make deals, I snuck Dino’s one-footed superhero from his dresser, walked it into the kitchen and pried the vent up, dropped it down into that darkness, and then I tried to wait up for Dad, crossing the kitchen again, but fell asleep in the corner under the table and didn’t wake until Mom draped a blanket over me in the morning.

  * * *

  The whole next week was nothing. Dino kept eating as much as ever, Mom got another carton of cigarettes, and I started digging up what I told myself wasn’t a car from the front pasture, but a truck. The truck. Because ghosts need anchors in the physical, living world, don’t they? What might have happened was that, up on the reservation, Dad runs a truck too hard, throws a rod, so that truck gets left behind. But someone else picks it up, drags it down here with plans of using it for a parts truck, or maybe they have an engine from a car that’ll mate with the transmission.

  What happens instead is that the truck gets left behind, and a landlord wants the place to look clean, so he scoops a hole in the ground with a tractor, then nudges that truck over in the hole, such that only one tire is sticking up, like the last hand of a drowning person. Give the sun and snow a couple years at that tire, though, and it’s down to steel belts, then nothing. Just a rusted old rim some stupid kid can bark his shin against one day and then remember later, once the dead start walking.

  I dug for the whole afternoon, and what I had convinced myself was an axle housing spearing out from that rusted wheel, it turned out to be a pipe welded to it, with a single chainlink tacked to the top of the pipe buried twelve feet behind me. I’d seen a link of chain tacked to a pipe like that before, at my old school. This was someone’s old tetherball pole.

  I stood it up. It rocked back and forth, settled, like waiting for what was next.

  I had no idea what was next.

  I looked to the house, to make sure Dino wasn’t sneaking off the porch, and the curtain in the window was just falling back into place.

  I went cold inside.

  Mom was at work.

  I took a single step backward, just instinct, and then I was running for the porch and then up the front of the porch, not the steps, and through the door, into the darkness inside.

  Dino was seizing in front of his favorite cartoon, and—I remember this as clear as anything in my life—getting across the living room to him, even though it was only ten feet, it was all slow motion, it was like the carpet was tall or I was small, and I was having to wade through, fight my way over, reach ahead because this was all taking so long.

  There was spittle frothed all on Dino’s lips and his eyes were mostly back to the whites, and his fingers were going past double-jointed, his elbows pulling in, his pants hot with pee.

  I forced my finger between his teeth, gave him that to bite on, and held him until the shaking stopped.

  He came back in stages, like usual. By the end of it he was watching the next cartoon, hadn’t even realized yet that his pants were wet, I don’t think.

  “Hey, man,” I said. “You see what I found out there?”

  He looked over to me like just realizing I was there.

  “Out where?” he said.

  I tilted my head out front.

  He looked back to his cartoon, like being sure this was a moment in the story he could walk away from, and then he stood with his bag of chips, and—this was what I was testing—he didn’t go to the window to look out front. He went to the front door, hauled it open, studied the pasture through the storm door.

  “It’s a flagpole,” I told him.

  By the time Mom made it home, we had a home-drawn pirate flag up there in the wind, more or less. Because we didn’t have enough black marker to make the pale yellow towel from the bathroom look scary, we’d used one of Mom’s last two black dish towels. The face and bones were masking tape.

  I thought we were going to get swatted, but instead, we ate sloppy joes on the porch and watched the pirate flag whip in the wind and finally break free of its knot, lift into the sky, come down on the wrong side of the neighbor’s chainlink.

  The dogs were on it right when it touched down. It probably tasted like a hundred and fifty dinners all at once.

  “Hated that towel anyways,” Mom said, and leaned back in her chair, blew smoke up into the dusk for a long time, and for the first time, I think, I was happy to be living right where we were.

  The feeling didn’t last.

  * * *

  That night—I want to say it was a dream, but I’ve never remembered my dreams. Or maybe I walk through them.

  Nothing happened. That I knew of.

  I just slept even though I hadn’t meant to, and woke in my bed, my feet not dirty or anything.

  If Dino seizured in the night, he didn’t bite his tongue or hurt himself.

  Everything was so good, really, that I figured it kind of compelled me to keep my end of a deal I was only just now suspecting.

  “Dad’s back,” I said over cereal, through the hustle and bustle and cussing of a weekday before school.

  Mom was walking through the kitchen, on the way to the utility room, for Dino’s other pair of pants. She took maybe three more steps and then she stopped, like re-listening in her head, and then she looked back to me.

  “Say what?” she said.

  “Dad,” I said over my next, intentionally big, slurping bite. No eye contact.

  Mom looked into the living room, like to be sure Dino had cartoons tuned in, not us.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Juney,” she said.

  I hated her calling me that.

  I plunged my spoon into the bowl again.

  “I saw him the other night,” I said, shrugging like this was no big. “He’s different now. Better.”

  “You saw him where?” Mom said, giving me her full attention now.

  What she was thinking, I know, was the neighbors just had someone get processed out of lockup, and now they were standing out at the fence, watching the little boys who had moved in next door.

  “Right here,” I said, nodding to the kitchen. “He was going back to the utility room.”

  Mom just stared at me some more.

  “Your father never did laundry,” she finally said. “I don’t think he would come back from the afterlife to run a load of whites.”

  In the living room the cartoon swelled and crashed, and we both listened underneath it for the heel of a foot spasming into the carpet.

  Dino was okay, though. Sucking on a yogurt.

  “He’s a fancydancer now,” I said. “You should see him.”

  Mom, even though there was never time for this in the morning, sat down across from me, skated both her hands across to hold the one of mine that was there.

  “That’s why you were asking about him,” she said.

  “He’s my dad,” I told her.

  “You look like him,” she said back. “I never tell you because I don’t want to make you sad. But I remember him from elementary. If w
e were back home, everybody would be saying it.”

  This made my eyes hot. I looked away, took my hand back.

  “He’s coming back to help make Dino better,” I said.

  Mom wouldn’t look away from my face.

  “How would he find us, all the way down here?” she said, her voice like she was letting me down soft, here.

  “We’re his family,” I said.

  Mom nodded, looked past me, into the living room, and I realized then that she didn’t miss him like I did.

  It was why he’d shown himself to me, not her. It was why that bead had hidden itself in the ducts under the house, not stuck around for her to—

  And then, all at once, like crashing over me, it hit me: I’d scoured every inch of every room of the house, sure. I’d even drawn our floor plan out, reducing the inches to millimeters on my ruler as best I could, to make sure there weren’t any hidden rooms, any closets that had been boarded over by some past renter.

  It was all there in my science notebook.

  And, while I’d looked out in the pasture for evidence—only finding a ceremonially buried tetherball pole and the other usual trash of people having lived here once—I hadn’t taken into account the most likely place a person who was dead might want to live, to be close to his family: under the house.

  We were up on cinderblock pylon things, not settled onto a concrete foundation. It was why the landlord had come over our first winter: to crawl down there, rewrap the pipes that had no other insulation. He said the varmints would chew it off again in a year or two, but we’d be good for the cold. And we had been, mostly.

  “What?” Mom said, seeing some version of all this wash over my face, I guess.

  “The bus,” I said, rising with my bowl.

  She took it from me, studied me for a moment too long, then flicked her head to the outside world, meaning go, school already, and like that, me and Dino were hand in hand down the rut-road to the bus stop, the dogs pacing us on the other side of the chainlink.

  This time, when the kid from my PE nudged Dino over into a kid I didn’t know, trying to get the game started, instead of my usual repositioning, my usual guiding Dino over to my other side, I lit into this kid without even saying anything first.