Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

  The bus driver had to pull me off. The kid was going to need a note for PE today. Maybe all week.

  I hadn’t even heard the air brakes hiss to a stop behind us.

  Dino was just watching me, standing there with my chest heaving, tears coming all down my face.

  “I’ve got him,” the bus driver said, his hand to Dino’s shoulder, and I nodded thank-you, was already running back along the chainlink, scraping my fingers over the rough wire the whole way, the dogs rising to the top of the fence again and again, snapping and snarling.

  I ran faster, more headlong, and was just to the side of the house when the front door opened.

  Our car started on the third try for Mom, and she didn’t know she should have been looking behind the house for me. I was at school. It was just another day.

  You look like him, she’d told me.

  I could see him back home, too, just like this. My dad, at my age. Hiding behind my grandma’s house, his face wet, the mountains opening up behind him.

  But I could also see him standing from that, taller and taller, his shadow feathered and already moving like a dance.

  The reason he was only showing up now to help Dino, it was that it had taken him a long time to walk all the way down here.

  “I won’t let them hurt Dino,” I said into the side of the house, but really, I was trying to make sure he could hear me through the windblown cracks in the skirt.

  Inside, the cartoon in the living room was still playing.

  I sat down on the propane tank and ate my lunch three hours early and watched the skirt of the house for a response. For a finger reaching through. For an eye, watching out. For an older version of me, here to save us.

  * * *

  You could pull the skirt of the house out easy, I found. It was just tin or aluminum or something, corrugated like cardboard, but it would flap back into place as soon as you let go. So, I went out to the tetherball pole, leaned it over like pulling a flag down, and rolled it in about a thousand switchback arcs to the house.

  Then it was just a matter of guiding the top of the pole in through a crack and working the wheel so the pole could hold the flap open.

  That it worked so perfect told me I was on the right path.

  But I still couldn’t go in.

  He was my dad, yeah. But he was also dead.

  I walked back and forth in front of the house. I looked as deep into the dark as I could without crossing the threshold.

  I squatted there and said, quiet because ghosts hear everything anyway, “Dad?”

  I bet every Indian kid who’s lost a dad, he does this at some point. I don’t know why it’s special to Indians. But I think it is.

  He didn’t say anything back at first, but when he did, I wasn’t sure if it was in my ear or in my head. Either way, it was like he was using my own voice to do it.

  It wasn’t my name he said, or Mom’s, or Dino’s, or even hello.

  What he said, what I heard, it was Look.

  It made an instant lump in my throat. I fell back, sat in the dirt, the muscles close to all my bones grabbing tighter on to the bone.

  Look.

  I leaned forward, thought that was what he meant, but then a rustle behind me pulled my head around.

  The rustle wasn’t the top cuffs of boots brushing into each other, and it wasn’t a rattle being held deep in a hand, to hush it.

  It was a dog, standing there, big strings of saliva coming down from its mouth.

  It was halfway between me and where the tetherball pole had been buried. The reason it was just standing there, it was that it was probably questioning what it had done to deserve a gift like this. It was waiting for me to just be a mirage, a dream.

  One that was making it slobber all the way down to the ground.

  It had gone to that dug-up hole first, I think. For the new smells. Maybe that was part of the route it took into the pasture every day, when it jumped the fence, went on patrol, or hunting, or whatever it did.

  But now here was me. I didn’t even make sense. At first.

  When I did, the dog’s haunches bunched and dirt shot up behind it and its mouth opened to tell me what all it was going to do to me.

  I squeaked a sound of pure fear, twisted around, and kicked through the skirt, into the darkness under the house, and only just managed to guide the tetherball pole out at the last instant, so the flap could shut the dog out.

  It clawed at the base of the skirt and barked and snarled enough that the rest of the dogs finally came over the fence for whatever this was.

  It was me.

  I was crying and snuffling and hugging myself, having to keep my head low so it wouldn’t collect all the webs spun under the floor of the living room—which, if this was the underside of the living room, then what did that make it, right?

  I wouldn’t say it out loud, even in my head.

  * * *

  I’d seen coyotes go after a rabbit, when they didn’t have anything better to kill. They don’t just dig a bit and give up, they excavate until they find a beating heart.

  I was that rabbit, now.

  The neighbor dogs, they’d been waiting for this ever since we moved in. The only thing that was saving me was that dogs only know to push, not to pull, and the one flap of the skirt that was loose, it overlapped a solid flap, so it would only push in for a car bumper someday.

  Not that the dogs weren’t trying.

  That just scraped my nerves raw, though, which isn’t permanent damage. What would be more permanent was when the other three caught onto what the yellowy-white one was already doing: reaching down with one big paddle of a paw, to dig under.

  As big as these dogs were, and as sharp as the bottom of the skirt would be, they were going to have to really tunnel. But I trusted that they hated me enough to do just that. The prize would be worth the work.

  I swallowed and the sound was loud in my ears.

  My eyes had adjusted some now. Enough that the sunlight edging in through the cracks and seams in the skirt showed shapes, anyway.

  I’d imagined it would smell like an animal den in here, that it would be moist and sticky.

  It was just dry and dead.

  I beat the side of my fist on the bottom of the living room, even though I’d seen my mom leave already. Moms are capable of a lot, I knew. I didn’t put it past her to hear me needing help somehow and shrike across the thirteen miles from her work, tear into this pack with her bare hands.

  What I got back, instead of an answering knock or a footstep, was a faceful of fine dust I was too slow to close my eyes against.

  And then something was on my hand, something with feet. I panicked back into a strut or a pipe, shaking my whole arm like it was on fire, and a moth batted into my face. I registered what it was right away but still flinched back all the same, into that same strut or pipe or whatever, nearly knocking myself senseless.

  This reinvigorated the dogs.

  I didn’t have to act like a hurt rabbit for them anymore. It wasn’t an act anymore, I mean.

  Now each time the yellowy-white paw stabbed down under the skirt for more dirt, it was like it was reaching down out of the sun.

  Every few scoops, the paw would be replaced by a nose, breathing my fear in.

  I pushed as far away as possible. I wasn’t exactly thinking rationally. All I knew, I guess, it’s that the more distance between me and them, the longer it might take them to find me.

  If you can delay pain, you delay it, don’t you? Even when it’s inevitable. Especially when there’s teeth involved.

  The farthest I could get was right under Mom’s bedroom.

  The whole way there, it was just dirt and the old dead weeds and grass that must have been live weeds and grass when this house got delivered here. They’d turned into mummies of themselves, mummies that crumbled into less than dust when I touched them. Twice I hit my head on something sharp under the house, and when I started ducking, then I hit my shoulder and back on it thr
ee more times, something up there tearing my shirt and cutting me, it felt like.

  I beat on the floor again, just to say I had, I guess, that I’d tried everything I could, and I pushed back into the farthest corner of the skirt. My idea was that I could push my way out—from this side, the overlap would help me—make some kind of suicidal dash for the pump house roof, which I would magically fly up onto. Fear would give me wings, I don’t know.

  I didn’t get all the way to the crack of light in the skirt, though.

  Instead, I planted my hand into . . . a nest?

  It was tacky and scratchy both at once, like whatever was living there had pulled all the broken things under the trailer under it, and then slobbered all over them until the trash went soft, could get shaped.

  Only—not a nest, no. I looked with hands, traced out the contours.

  A nest is open at the top.

  This was more like a burst-open chrysalis.

  One with a pocket deep down big enough for three of me.

  My first thought was bobcats, since that was supposedly why the neighbor had all these dogs—bobcats had used to steal his grandfather’s chickens, so now it was a forever war—except this didn’t smell remotely feline. It didn’t smell like anything, really. And animals always have a scent, don’t they? Even the hunter animals, the reason they face into the wind, it’s that they don’t want their scent to get ahead of them, give them away.

  Not this hunter.

  It could come from any direction.

  “Even the front door,” I heard myself say.

  Dad?

  I didn’t say it this time, didn’t know if I wanted it to be real, didn’t know if what started there could gestate or incubate or pupate into the kind of silhouette I’d felt crossing behind me in the living room. That I’d seen crossing the kitchen.

  But you have to come from something, don’t you?

  I told myself yes, you had to.

  Because—because a ghost, it’s basically useless, it’s just a vision, a phantasm. It doesn’t even make sense that it could interact with light, much less a floor or a person or clothes. Meaning it had to have some kind of organic beginning, right?

  I was still nodding, figuring this out.

  When you come back from the dead, you’re a spirit, you’re nothing, just some leftover intention, some unassociated memory. But then, then what if a cat’s sneaked into a dark space like this, right? What if that cat comes here to die, because it got slapped out on the road or hit by an owl or something, so it lays back in the corner to pant it out alone. Except, in that state, when it’s hurt like that, when this cat isn’t watching the way it usually does, something else can creep in. Something dead.

  It’s the injury that opens the door, I knew. The corruption.

  But a cat isn’t a person.

  Now that cat that’s not dying, is just panting, it has to wait for something else to crawl in, and then something else, and a third and fourth and finally some fiftieth thing. Just one worm at a time. You can build a self like that, if you compact it all together. If you remember how you used to be.

  And if someone up in the living part of the house, if they remembered you too.

  Dad was back because he loved us, yes. But it was also because I believed in him.

  “Dad!” I said then, beating again on the floor of the house with the flat of my hands.

  My face was muddy, I know, from the dust sifting down onto my tears and snot.

  There was more daylight where the dogs were digging now. Almost enough daylight.

  I pushed back into the nest, into where Dad had been rebirthed, and my left hand felt out something more regular than the rest.

  I brought it up, couldn’t see it.

  Three pushes over was the crack at the top of two panels. Just enough light.

  I held my find up.

  It was Dino’s superhero action figure.

  It was whole now, like it had never been bitten through.

  I smiled, understood: this was what I’d been telling Mom. Exactly. Dad was here to fix Dino. To help him. I was holding the proof right here in my hands.

  I stuffed it into my pocket.

  It was all about timing, now.

  Just—the problem was there were four dogs, not one. With one, I could wait until it slithered under the skirt, then push through on this side, race for the pump house. With four dogs, though, they’d have to one-at-a-time it. Meaning that if I pushed through right when one crawled under, that would give the three waiting their turn a chance to hear me, come barreling around the side of the house.

  And if I waited until all four crawled under, then the first would be to me by the time the fourth was crawling under, and I’d never get to push out.

  There was no way to win.

  I told my mom I was sorry. I told Dino his numbers up through twelve, and told him not to laugh about “8” like he always did. It could be funny, his funny snowman, but let it be secret-funny, and just keep going, on to nine and ten and eleven and twelve.

  I told my dad it wasn’t his fault. That he never would have left us. That that truck had probably been going to blow a rod any day now anyway.

  I was crying hard by then. From fear, from feeling sorry for myself. I was even already picturing ahead to what Dino would find when he got home from the bus stop alone. The dogs probably would have dragged me out front. Would I even still be a body? Would he play with it like it was just a squirrel or a cat they’d torn into? And would he then have to grow up knowing that it had been my thigh meat he’d flipped over three times, to see how much dirt would stick to it?

  Mom would know right off, of course.

  I hoped she wouldn’t blame herself for moving us here. I hoped all kinds of things, except what finally happened, right at the last moment, when there was a yellowy-white head under the skirt, snapping and snarling, in a frenzy.

  What happened was footsteps crossed the floor of our house with authority. With impatience. Heavy footsteps.

  And then the door opened, shut, and the first dog squealed.

  Then the next, and the next, and then that yellowy-white head that was pushed under the skirt, it stayed there. But blood was coming from the mouth now.

  My breath hitched twice—I was about to scream, I couldn’t help it, it was welling up from a place deeper than I could tamp down—and I stood all at once, to just leave this place, this scene, this everything, and what I stood into was a strut or a pipe or I didn’t know what, just that it was one thousand times more solid than me.

  My face washed cold, my fingers tingled like they were going to sleep all at once, and all I knew with the world tunneling down from black to blacker, it was to claw for that one line of light I could see.

  * * *

  I woke with my mom hugging me to her. It was still daytime. She was holding me to her and she was screaming to someone, at someone.

  It was the neighbor. He was on his knees with his hands behind his back. There was a shotgun on the ground before him, broken over. That’s how I knew it was a shotgun.

  When I could see around my mom better, there was a sheriff’s deputy there. He was tall. His hat was on the ground. I kept looking from his hat to his head, like I didn’t understand they could separate.

  The sirens in the air were the ambulance, coming for the way my head was bleeding.

  When the paramedics reached down for me, I shrunk away from their monstrous silhouettes, my breath going deep again, so my mom went with me. It was sixteen stitches. I didn’t even feel them. The reason I didn’t, it was that I think I finally went into shock, being led past our porch, where the dogs had been digging. Where the tetherball pole and wheel still were, the pole standing up now.

  The whole front of our house was splashed with blood that had dried while I was knocked out.

  And—this was the theory—evidently I’d sleepwalked again, once my conscious mind lost its grip.

  Laid over the eyes of each destroyed dog were pieces of bla
ck fabric. Even the yellowy-white dog-head that had been left behind under the skirt, it had been pulled out, got the blinder treatment. On that dog the blindfold was more like a mask. Its tongue lolled out, was swelling.

  The whole time I was getting stitched, the neighbor was yelling that I was a menace, that I wasn’t natural, that I wasn’t right. That a human couldn’t do this to four dogs, and any human that did needed to be put down, and that it was his God-given duty to do just that, he didn’t care how many deputies the county sent.

  Even when the sheriff’s deputy guided him into the back of the cop car, the guy was still going off.

  He’d come over with a gun, after his dogs. He wasn’t coming home for a few days at least, my mom told me. And when he did, he’d be under strict orders from the sheriff himself, probably. She smoothed my hair down on the uncut side of my head and told me that if I even stubbed my toe in the future, that neighbor would probably go to jail.

  Dino was just standing by Mom’s leg, watching me.

  I was now the brother who had taken on the dogs next door, and won.

  Except it hadn’t been me.

  The sheriff’s deputy kind of knew it too, I think. In his job, you see what a human body can and can’t do, I imagine. You assess a scene right when you walk onto it, so you can apportion blame out appropriately. And some of it comes down to simple laws of nature.

  Can a slight twelve-year-old tear into a pack of dogs like that, when each one of those dogs outweighs him?

  Never mind that they said I was groggy when Mom got there, called in by Dino, who couldn’t count to twelve but was able to read her number off the wall well enough, dial it into the phone.

  That was the real miracle of the day, as far as I was concerned.

  Mom just pulled me to her again, when the ambulance and the sheriff’s deputy were pulling away. When it was quiet at last.

  Where I’d been when she found me, she said, it was halfway crawled through the house skirt over at the corner, under her bedroom. It wasn’t a question, exactly. But I could have answered it, I think.