Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I didn’t.

  She didn’t ask after her last black dish towel. The one I would have had to get inside the house to unfold from its drawer. I had a key, but why would I have relocked the door behind me? Why would I have come outside at all, with the dogs there? Why was I even home at all?

  The way I would have torn the dish towel into even strips, though, I imagined I would have done that with my teeth, starting the tear at the edge, then pulling steady down in a straight line, three times. My hands bloody from not holding my own head, and not from hammering them into the ground with the wheel-base of the tetherball pole, but from grabbing the four dogs at both ends and, one by one, tearing them in two.

  About dusk, the sheriff’s deputy came back in his personal truck and shone his lights onto the front of our house, the light coming through our window bright enough, it threw Dino and my shadow onto the back wall by the television. We were standing in the window, watching him shovel up what was left of the dogs.

  He lifted the remains into the back of the truck, and then the deputy stepped onto the porch and we shrunk back.

  Mom talked to him at the door in muttery tones we couldn’t get any words from, and they didn’t hug at the end of it or anything. But I think they could have.

  For Dad, I pretended not to see.

  * * *

  After stew from the can—mine and Dino’s favorite, because stew came with unlimited club crackers we could lick the salt off first—Mom screwed a different lightbulb into the porch and dragged a rake back and forth across the dirt in front of the porch.

  The reason she got a different lightbulb, it was that when she’d turned it on for the sheriff’s deputy, it had shone red, had been misted or splashed or clumped with gore—I never saw the actual bulb, just the bloody light it smeared onto the porch. The sheriff’s deputy had unscrewed it, tossed it into the back of his truck like nothing. Just more trash to be dumped at some dead-end pit out in the pasture.

  He had taken the big parts, and now Mom was working the smaller bits into the dirt.

  I guessed about anything might grow up from there, now.

  When Mom came back in, I could tell she wanted to ask me a thousand and one questions, but instead we just watched a detective show where the detective had a cool car, and then she made sure to tuck us each into our beds tight, and kiss us into place like she used to.

  I woke hours later, thought I was finally dreaming at last, because I couldn’t feel myself standing. That meant I was floating, right? Wrong. It meant my feet were asleep again. I’d deadfooted it out of bed. And I had the distinct feeling in my throat that I’d just been saying something.

  That left me two questions at once: what had I been saying, and who had I been saying it to?

  I was alone in the kitchen, the refrigerator open behind me, cold on the back of my thighs.

  “Thank you,” I said to the darkness, to the night. Because it seemed like what I should be saying, for that afternoon. For the dogs.

  Instead of going back to bed like usual, like makes sense if you don’t have a blanket, I dodged the creaky parts of the floor across to the couch, and laid there with my head cocked up on the arm. There was a line of glare in the dead television screen from the lamp and I watched it, blinking as little possible, because as soon as that line of light broke, that was going to mean something had passed between me and it. And, if it came from the right, that meant Dad was done with fixing Dino. And if it came from the left, that meant he was just getting started.

  What I wanted was to see him again, for real. Not just thinking about how he must have been at my age. Not just building him up in my mind from the stories Mom told. Not just seeing him through his sisters’ words, where they only remembered the best parts. I wanted to see him as the dogs had, in full regalia and facepaint.

  Hell yes, they’d squealed. Not that it mattered.

  Death hadn’t even been able to stop him. Four big dogs didn’t stand much of a chance, had they?

  When the interstate lights finally blotted out, it wasn’t because I was drifting off, it was because a body was there.

  Dino.

  He was saying my name, looking for me.

  All over his back and stomach were cusswords and pictures that Mom hadn’t seen, because he’d fallen asleep in his school clothes, watching the detective-and-his-car show. He’d got hot in the night, though, peeled out of his shirt.

  “Deener,” I said without sitting up.

  He looked over to the sound of my voice, his face blank, not expecting anything. I led him back to our bathroom and used a washcloth with warm water to rub off all the words that had got written on him on the bus. All the pictures that had been drawn onto him because I wasn’t there to stop it from happening.

  In my head I told my dad I was sorry. That I would be there next time, and all the times after that, too.

  Up under Dino’s ear on the left side, there was a hickey, even. Which no way could be from lips. I’d seen the kids at school doing them other ways. The best way was to get someone to Uncle-Sam their chin—to squeeze their chin-skin tight, into a prune, until somebody came down from the top, slammed that hand off, bruising the skin—but there was some way that was kind of like frogging an arm muscle. I hadn’t seen it close up. As near as I could tell, you pinched somebody’s skin between your first two knuckles, then spit down onto it and twisted hard.

  That was the image I had to have, of Dino’s bus ride home.

  I guided him by the shoulders back into bed. I’d been able to get all the ink off, but not the hickey under his ear. You can’t rub a bruise off, no matter how hot the water is.

  The hickey was big, had to have been a high schooler, to have hands like that.

  And how many people had trailed their lines of spit down?

  I hated them all. I hated them so much, it made my eyes hot.

  I tucked Dino in, kissed him in place just like Mom—he was groggy by then, probably didn’t know who I was, exactly—and when I was standing back up, my eyes dragged across the reflection in his window.

  There was a man standing in the doorway of Dino’s room.

  There were feathers coming off him at all angles.

  He was just a shape, a shadow in the glass, but I knew him.

  I closed my eyes, let him leave.

  * * *

  Two mornings later, at the bus stop, Dino counted to nineteen all by himself. And then he fell right into a seizure, the worst one yet.

  One of the girls who carried her books with a strap, not a bag, she ran back to flag Mom down.

  It was the second time the ambulance had come out. At three hundred dollars per trip.

  The sheriff’s deputy showed up too and just watched, but afterward he said something to the medic who was the driver, and that medic shut his metal clipboard in a way that Mom had to look away from to cry about.

  When the sheriff’s deputy came to talk to her, she picked Dino up and ran inside, pulling me behind her.

  I didn’t know what was happening.

  The sheriff’s deputy sat out there for a while—I watched him from my bedroom window—and then he backed up, eased away, his left arm patting the outside of the door of his truck in a way that kind of made me know him.

  Because Mom couldn’t miss any more shifts—she also wasn’t supposed to be late even one more time, but it was a little late for that, she said—I got to stay home from school with Dino. She explained to me that when your brother’s sick, then you can count as sick too.

  We weren’t sick, though.

  After she was gone, I used some kite string and a football to rig us some tetherball action, to make up for what had happened on the bus.

  We batted the football back and forth, but the point hurt when it caught you in the head or the side, so we ended up playing a game where we would throw the ball like a football, like it probably wanted to be thrown. Who won was who got it to go around the most times before it touched the pole. I was the one who had to
count the revolutions, but I did it out loud so Dino could chime in, help me complete the word of each number.

  What I found was that if you threw downwards, sort of, you could get more times around. I explained it to Dino until he got it, had the idea he was going to have friends over at some point and would need to know how to win one game.

  When he picked it up, that you throw down to make it go longer, I let him beat me three times with the trick. In between throws, I found myself always watching the dark cracks between the house skirts. It was funny: from inside, they were cracks of light, but out here, they were cracks of darkness.

  I imagined Dad watching us from that crack.

  His boys, his sons.

  We were going to make it, I told him.

  We were all right.

  That night, after cornbread with beans cooked into it like Grandma used to make, I got my science notebook out. The one with the map I’d drawn of the interior of our house. I turned the page, made a chart now. It was Dino’s seizures on the vertical arm. The only thing I could think to put on the horizontal arm, it was the idiots at the bus stop.

  Was there a correlation? Was this a nerves thing to him? Did pressure or getting pushed around activate something in him that was already going wrong?

  I drilled inky dots into the corner of the page, trying to think it all through, and finally decided I needed more data.

  I was just getting started on the next page—on the scary silhouette of a fancydancer I was going to tell Mom was just anybody, just something I was making up—when Dino was standing in my doorway.

  “The show,” he said.

  I sighed my best big-brother sigh, made a production of setting my notebook aside, and pulled my way across the room, down to the living room.

  His show, he was right: there was a fuzz of static over it now.

  “Tell me when it’s better,” I said to him, and went out the back door, sat down on the ground to twist the base of the tall antenna, try to find the signal, the door open behind me so Dino could call out when I found the sweet spot.

  Mom came out and sat on the back steps and smoked a cigarette, watched the horizon, and, I think, me.

  “You were talking about your father,” she said.

  “Better yet?” I called out to Dino, because I’d nearly worked the antenna all the way around in its base, and the wire was going to wrap soon.

  “He’s playing with his heroes,” Mom said, shrugging like what could you do.

  I gave up on the antenna.

  “It’s only natural,” Mom said then, narrowing her eyes at a pair of headlights out on the interstate, maybe. Or just to get her words in order. “You’re—the age you are, this is when you start really needing to have a dad around.”

  I pried a clod of dirt up, lobbed it at the propane tank just to watch it explode against all that silver paint.

  “I’m all right,” I told her.

  This is the lie, when you’re twelve. And all the other years, too.

  You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.

  “You do need a man around,” she said anyway, then smushed her cigarette out on the second step from the top and deposited the butt in the coffee can she kept under the stairs, like hiding it.

  Minutes after she’d gone back inside to get Dino started in his bed process, it hit me, what she was saying—no, what she was asking: What if that sheriff’s deputy came over for dinner one night? Or to drag a harrows across all the packed dirt, so maybe something could grow up from it?

  I lobbed another dirt clod at the propane tank, missed altogether, and then came down to my knees fast, scrabbling all the dirt clods and rocks to me that I could, to sling right into the heart of that propane tank.

  Hit, hit, miss, hit.

  I was breathing hard.

  The skirt of the house, it was right behind me.

  I turned, regarded it up and down its whole fourteen inches of long triangular darkness, and finally, like a trade, picked all Mom’s old butts from the coffee can and pushed them through one at a time. It was an offering.

  Then I put the can back but tipped it over like the wind might have blown it over, so it could get a last drag on all those cigarettes.

  In my head I was walking the floor plan in my science notebook. I was a stick figure pacing the halls, looking in every room. On patrol.

  The television wasn’t working, you say?

  Could it be because there was somebody under the floor right exactly there? Not because he wanted to hear that show better but because his youngest son was sitting right in front of that screen.

  Indians, we don’t have guardian angels—if we did, they’d have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it’s supposed to be an animal.

  Maybe when you need more, though, maybe then you get a person.

  Maybe then your father gets special permission to come back, so long as he stays hidden.

  So long as nobody tries to rat him out.

  Meaning, yes, it was me who’d killed those four dogs. It was me who laid that torn-in-four black dishcloth over their eyes.

  And it was my fault the cartoon wouldn’t play without static.

  Just for luck, I dug up one more dirt clod, a big flat one, and aimed hard, slung it as hard as I could into the side of the propane tank.

  It exploded exactly as I’d wanted it to: a big dusty cloud, billowing out and thinning.

  Then that plume took on a dim glow.

  I stepped one step up the back stairs, my hand to the knob of the door, and then I saw the glow for what it was.

  The neighbor’s back porch light.

  He was home from jail.

  * * *

  Instead of asking the deputy sheriff over for dinner right away, like all the cop shows said would happen, the deputy sheriff drove me and Dino to school the next three days. He’d heard what happened at the bus stop.

  I just stared out the window on my side. I was playing the prisoner. I was being transported to my next holding facility. An armed guard was transporting me. He was under orders not to talk to me. Not that I was going to try.

  On the way back from school, in the big empty space before you got to our clump of houses, he let Dino flip the switch that fired the sirens up. Later, while Mom was warming spaghetti and then forgetting she was warming spaghetti, I told Dino to shut up so I could hear the television. He was playing with his trucks in front of the couch and making siren sounds with his mouth.

  Dino did stop, and then I had to watch the show I hadn’t even been watching.

  I just picked at my burned spaghetti.

  That night when I was standing at the window, I was in my pants, not just my underwear. I was watching for the deputy sheriff’s truck, now. To do what? I had no idea. Just to prove it to myself, I guess.

  I tried not to blame Mom. She didn’t know Dad was back, and she wouldn’t believe me if I told her, and if I told her, it would make him leave, anyway. So, all I could do was watch.

  I fell asleep with my head leaning against the glass and the wall, and when I woke, I jerked around, to try to see a shape just stepping past.

  The living room was empty.

  But you’re supposed to be getting more solid, I said inside.

  Not more invisible.

  Nothing invisible could have done that to the four dogs.

  And—and Dino. He hadn’t had a seizure for days now.

  I pushed away from the window to go to bed, because nothing was working, because everything was stupid, and I nearly had my eyes pulled all the way away when I saw motion out front.

  I’d thought the wheel at the base of the tetherball pole was going to be a truck with a thrown rod.

  What I saw now told me maybe it was—that maybe the truck hadn’t been dragged down here, but parts of it had come down all the same.

  The wheel, maybe.

  The
football was going around the tall pole.

  I smiled.

  Because the front door squeaked and squealed—Mom said it was the best alarm—I went out the back door, by Dino’s room. He could sleep through anything.

  The football was just tapping into the pole by the time I came around the side of the house, having to test each step for sharpness before giving it my weight.

  I let the football hang there for a few breaths, and then I picked it up, handed it around and around the pole until I had to walk it around.

  It was my turn.

  “Watch this,” I said, and flung the ball at a spot in the dirt maybe six feet in front of me. The string grabbed it in a perfect parabola, flung it high and around, so I had to fall away from getting hit. I kept on falling, too, caught myself on my elbows.

  That was why the headlights didn’t spear me in place.

  I stayed down, turned over onto my stomach.

  The truck was just coasting, not turned on.

  When the headlights turned to wash across the front of our house, they cut off just in time. Just the brake lights flaring in the barely there dust the tires had coughed up.

  The sheriff’s deputy.

  Mom stepped out onto the porch, didn’t turn the light on.

  The sheriff’s deputy guided his door shut, just one click deep, and followed her back inside.

  I told my dad not to look, not to listen.

  No lights glowed on in the house.

  I rolled onto my back, stared straight up.

  The football just hung there on its string.

  I understood. Lying there then, I patted my pocket for the superhero I was just remembering, from the day all the dogs died. It wasn’t there, had been too long, and these were the wrong pants anyway.

  What I’d wanted to do, it was hold it up against the backdrop of all the stars so its silhouette could fly back and forth.

  Except I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  I was the man of the house, at least until Dad got solid enough for Mom and Dino to see him too.

  I stood, my hands balled into fists by my thighs.

  I walked back to the house, my line taking me to the front door so I could open it, let it squeak and squeal, but then I stopped at the sheriff’s deputy’s truck.