Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

  The driver’s side door opened easy, with no sound at all.

  I sat there behind the wheel, my hand cupped over the dome light.

  There was the siren switch right there.

  I smiled, was slow-motion reaching for it and all the excitement it would bring to this night when I remembered how the sheriff’s deputy had guided Dino’s hand there, instead of to the glove compartment Dino had been going for, because, in our car, that’s where Mom let him keep his road toys.

  After checking the front door and all the windows again—nothing—I opened that glove compartment myself.

  Tucked way back there was a short little revolver.

  I held it in wonder, careful of where the barrel pointed, and then I looked to the front door again. And then I went in through the back of the house, testing each step again, because I was one pistol heavier now, plus however many shells it held.

  * * *

  This time I didn’t have to be asleep, or just waking from it, to see Dad.

  I’d had the pistol held low, pointed at the ground, and had only looked in Dino’s room to be sure he was there, and not shaking under the covers.

  What I saw nearly made me pull the trigger, shoot my foot off.

  Dad—my years-dead father—he was leaned over Dino, had maybe been listening to his heart or whispering into his mouth. His fingertips were to either side of Dino’s sleeping shape, and he had one knee on the bed, one foot on the ground. And he was looking across the room like an animal, right into my soul. His eyes shone, not with light but with a kind of wet darkness. The mouth too—no, the lips. And curling up from them was smoke. From the cigarettes and ashes I’d funneled behind the skirt.

  My breath choked in my throat thinking about that, that taste, and I wavered in place there in the hall, caught between a scream and a fall, and when I sensed a body behind me, in the back door that was just a doorway because I’d left it open, I knew it was because I’d looked away from Dad in Dino’s bedroom. That I’d broken eye contact just long enough for him to step around the rules of the physical world come out here with me for a little father-son discussion.

  And—just because he couldn’t get whatever he needed from my neck, that didn’t mean he didn’t still have hands.

  The big pistol jerked up almost on its own, my arm straight behind it, and my finger was already pulling the trigger over and over into the middle of that darkness, that body.

  What I was saying inside, if anything, it was to stay away from my little brother. That you’re not helping anymore. That I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but—the shots cracked the world in half, then quarters, then slivers of itself.

  The flashes from the end of the barrel were starbursts of orange shot through with black streaks, and they strobed the inside of the hall bright white. And my shots, because of the recoil, because of the way the barrel jumped up each time I pulled the trigger, they were climbing from the midsection, higher and higher.

  Five.

  I shot five times.

  And the sound—I heard the first one deep in my head, and felt the other four in my shoulder, in my jaw, in the base of my spine.

  I know it’s too fast for tears to have come, but the way I remember it, I was crying and screaming while I shot.

  It was the worst thing ever.

  It was my dad.

  I was killing him again, wasn’t I?

  He’d clawed and fought his way back to us, and he’d come back better, he’d come back in the regalia he’d been supposed to wear, before everything else found him.

  And he danced. He was dancing now, with each shot.

  First his right side flung out, his arm following, and then his left, from the next bullet, and then, for just an instant, there was a clean hole right through the middle of the front of his head. Through his face.

  Just ten minutes ago, we’d been playing catch with the football.

  When you grow up with a dead father, this isn’t something you ever expect to get to do. It had felt like cheating. It had been the best thing ever.

  But now it was over.

  Because—I had to say it, just to myself—because he’d been feeding on Dino, I was pretty sure.

  The wet lips. The empty eyes.

  Dino’s seizures had started before I’d seen Dad walking across the living room, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been making that trip for three or four weeks already, then, did it?

  Dino was never going to set any math records, but his counting, it had been going all right, anyway. He was last in his class, was on special watch, was a grade or two behind. But whatever Dad was drinking from him, whatever Dad needed from him in order to get whole again, to come back, it was something Dino needed.

  It made me hate him.

  That fifth time I pulled the trigger, the last shot?

  It was the most on-purpose of any of them.

  I was holding that revolver with both hands by then, a stance I knew from TV. I was trying to get the front of the barrel to stop hopping up.

  The fifth shot, it went center mass. That was a term I knew from the cop shows, too.

  Dino, he knew all about dinosaurs and fairies and talking cars, from what he watched.

  Me, I knew about justice.

  And, thinking back on it now, we’re lucky not to have all blown up that night, from one of my shots hitting the propane tank.

  I was shooting at someone taller than me, though. That was the thing. It meant my shots were more or less pointing upwards, and climbing, once they splashed through.

  All that was behind us was empty pasture.

  One with a few more ounces of lead in it now. A few shards sprinkled down, coated in blood for the bugs to crawl over and lick, if bugs even have tongues.

  All this in maybe three seconds.

  A lifetime, sure. But an instant, too.

  The world was so quiet, after all that sound. And because I was deaf.

  I let the pistol thunk to the floor.

  It hit on the barrel, tumped over into my bare ankle. I flinched away, took a step forward to see what I’d done.

  Lying on his back just past the back stairs was the neighbor, who’d come for me just like he’d said he was going to. A different shotgun was clamped in his hands like if he just held on to it, he couldn’t fall back through whatever he was falling through, because its length would snag, would hold him up.

  It didn’t.

  He had no face, had a mass of bubbling red for a body.

  My chest sucked in, my whole body kind of undulating, and when I looked up, it was because the sheriff’s deputy was standing beside me, naked.

  A lot of grown men would have simply backhanded the upstart twelve-year-old punk who had taken a gun, unloaded it out the back door like that, just for attention.

  Not this sheriff’s deputy.

  His name was Larsen.

  Years later he would run for sheriff.

  His campaign speech probably didn’t include driving his knee into my side, so that I ragdolled over into the paneled wall. He probably didn’t put on any of his posters the way he didn’t let me fall but held me up with his left hand, for his right fist to drive into my teeth.

  I was a murderer, though.

  Killers, they deserve what they get, don’t they? You cash in your rights when you start blowing people away like I just had.

  By the sheriff’s deputy’s third punch, my mom was riding his arm.

  Me, I was on the carpet by then, my head turned to Dino’s open doorway.

  He was standing in it, his face slack, a thin line of clear water seeping down from behind his ear.

  I took a picture of him in my head to save for later—for all the jail and cameras and whatever was coming.

  It’s a picture I’ve still got.

  * * *

  None of us left the house the next day. Not me or Dino for school—it’s not like we had grades to wreck, really—and not Mom, for work. It would mean she’d have to get another job, probably somethin
g at night instead of day, but that was all for later.

  We sat on the couch and watched whatever the television gave us.

  There was so much static we could hardly tell who was who.

  When Mom finally turned it off with the bulky old controller, the curvy green screen reflected the three of us back at ourselves.

  The sheriff’s deputy—I didn’t bother knowing his name until high school—wasn’t there.

  Mom hadn’t just scratched him. She’d grown up on the reservation, I mean. She’d started fighting on the playground, had moved on to parking-lot scraps, and had even crashed a vase into someone’s face at a wake once. When the sheriff’s deputy had finally left, he’d left limping, and had to crank the window on his door down with the wrong hand.

  And no more deputies showed up. Not the sheriff either.

  I stared at my shape in the television screen, sure that next time we turned it on, that outline would stay but it would get filled in with my face. NATIVE AMERICAN ALMOST-TEEN SHOOTS NEIGHBOR OVER PETS, or something like that.

  But. Except.

  Where was everybody?

  Why was I still here?

  Did it have to do with the fact that I’d used the sheriff’s deputy’s drop-piece—I knew the term—and not his department-issued service revolver? Would turning me in mean he was turning himself in?

  It didn’t track.

  For most of the night I’d been in a daze, Mom trying to get my lips and nose and ear to stop bleeding. It wasn’t shock, but it wasn’t being completely awake, either.

  Now I was awake. All the way awake, my heart pounding.

  When the sheriff’s deputy had left, he’d left alone.

  He’d left once before with the dead—evidence—shoveled into the back of his truck.

  This time he’d just left it for us to deal with.

  For me to deal with.

  I wormed away from Mom and the blanket, guided Dino’s arm onto her leg instead of mine, and went to the sink first, for the coffee cup of water I didn’t want. But I needed an excuse to untangle from the living room.

  Next was the bathroom I didn’t need, at the end of the hall.

  On the way there, I stopped to whisper the back door open.

  There was no body. No blood.

  I swallowed a lump, stepped out to be sure. Then down the three wooden steps, the soles of my feet ready for the splinters I knew I deserved.

  Maybe ten feet to my right, one section of the skirt was . . . it wasn’t flapping shut, exactly. This was slower. This was that piece of corrugated tin or aluminum or whatever being held, and guided back to its careful overlap.

  I was breathing too deep now. I missed a step, my foot going through to the coffee can ashtray, the lip of the can scraping the back of my ankle, the sole of my foot whumping into the ash, sighing that smoky smell up into the air all around me.

  But I could still see. I had to see.

  There were drag marks in the dirt.

  Not from just now, but from—I guessed from when I was getting punched into the carpet in the hall. When I was staring into Dino’s room.

  Dad.

  If a cat and bugs and drinks from Dino could bring him far enough back to drag a full-grown, shot-dead man under the house, then what could a full-grown, shot-dead corpse do for him?

  I pulled back inside the house, shut the door, twisted the dead bolt, and hated that I had to call it that in my head.

  * * *

  After the weekend, which mostly involved me standing in Dino’s doorway all night, then falling asleep on the couch to cartoons, we were at the bus stop again. The sixth-graders and even the seventh-graders either gave us room, or they didn’t see what worse they could do to my face that wasn’t already done. Mom said that if the school tried to call Child Services on her, to tell them to call the sheriff’s department, too.

  Walking past the neighbor’s chainlink, there’d been no dogs to harass us. And no neighbor to harass us, either.

  How long until he was missed? Was he on probation now? Was he going to skip a check-in soon, and then the next check-in as well?

  I hadn’t been under the house again.

  There had to be a matted nest of hair and grass and saliva pulsating down there, though. Not pushed into the corner anymore but probably dug into the ground, in case I pulled all the skirts off at once, let the light in. I wasn’t sure whether what I was seeing in the secret parts of my head were my dad trying to crawl inside a corpse, wear it like more regalia, or if he was drinking it in somehow. All I did know was that if I uncovered him down there, then there would be a corpse riddled with bullet holes under our house, and that corpse would belong to a neighbor we already had bad history with.

  Everything was screwed.

  Soon Dad was going to be solid enough, he could just knock on the door. Except he wouldn’t knock, I knew.

  I always thought—I think anybody would think this—that when you come back from the dead like he had, that you’re either out to get whoever made you dead, or you’re there because you miss your people, are there to help them somehow.

  The way it was turning out, it was that you could maybe come back, be what you’d always meant to be, but to do that, you had to latch on to your people and drink them dry, leave them husks. After that, you could walk off into your new life, your second chance. With no family to hold you back.

  It wasn’t fair.

  He was going to be out there on the pow-wow circuit, taking every purse, walking out into the campers and lodges and back seats with whatever new girl, and nobody would ever know what he’d had to do to us in order to dance like that. After a few years, he’d probably even stay on one of those other reservations, have two more sons. Ones who weren’t broken. Ones he could teach things to, ones he could tell stories to.

  It made me want to throw our tethered football so hard into the ground that the whole pole fell down.

  Game over.

  School was school, like always.

  Teachers reading to us from lesson plans, hands going up, trays of food getting doled out. In the bathroom, with a dollar I’d stolen from my mom’s purse, I bought a tube of cinnamon toothpicks. They were the hot thing at this school—everybody trying to outburn the last batch. I threaded one between my teeth, but the liquid cinnamon the tube was swimming with found the cuts in my lip and gums, and made my eyes water.

  “Perfect,” the guy who’d sold me it said, and patted me on the shoulder, left me there by the paper-towel dispenser.

  After school, I made Dino watch cop shows with me. Which meant he did what he always did: melted off the couch like I wouldn’t notice, dug his toys out from under the coffee table, and walked and flew and drove them across the carpet between me and the television.

  The way I knew Dad could smell him, that he was right under that part of the floor now, it was that the show went all static.

  He was up, then. Out of the ground, cracked out of his chrysalis, however it worked. It didn’t even matter anymore. Figuring it all out wouldn’t change how any of it had to go.

  What could we do against him?

  Nothing.

  Even if he wasn’t dead or a ghost, he would still be our dad, wouldn’t he? What could a sixth-grader and a third-grader and a mom do against a dad? When they’re drinking, you can slip away, hide. But the only thing Dad was going to be drunk on, it was us.

  Dino, at least.

  Was that I was supposed to do, to save me and Mom? Leave Dino like an offering? Trade him for both of us?

  None of the cops on my shows would ever do that. Even for the worst criminal.

  Because of justice. Because of what’s right.

  Dino flew a superhero action figure up into the air to swoop back down against some convoy of dinosaurs—dinosaurs on the trailers of trucks, all lined up—and I recognized it as the one I’d rescued from under the house. Meaning I’d left it in my pocket, Mom had found it in the laundry, and she’d returned it back to Dino’s room. It�
��s the natural life cycle of toys. Even ones that had been bitten through, partially digested, then somehow been born again, whole.

  The reason I could see that superhero action figure so crisp, it was all the snow behind it on screen.

  When it swooped down, though, the cop show cleared up.

  Instead of telling Dino to do that again—fat chance—I waited for it to happen on its own.

  A T. rex batted the superhero back, and he tumbled up into the crackly white snow background then gathered himself, angled himself down, leading with his left fist, and when he came at that open-mouthed, ready-for-battle heavy metal T. rex, my detective on-screen cuffed another perp. The picture was clear enough I could see the tiny key he was holding between his teeth, that he spit down into the drain in the curb just to show this bad guy how soon he was getting out of these particular handcuffs.

  I didn’t care about the show anymore, though.

  That night, after Mom had lingered too long in each of our rooms like she wanted to say she was sorry—for what?—and after she’d stopped with the dishes in the kitchen, I crept into Dino’s room with my sloshing tube of toothpicks. What gave them their extra kick, I’d heard, it was a single drop of mace stolen from a mother’s purse.

  “Turn your head,” I said down to Dino, and he did it without questioning, in a way that made me hate myself, and the whole world.

  The hickey hidden behind his ear, I should have known it for a spigot the moment I saw it. You couldn’t grab any skin there, where it’s pulled so tight to the bone. Where there’s no meat, no muscle.

  Was that what made it good for Dad? Was he drawing something from the inside of Dino’s bones? Would Dino’s kneecaps also be raw in the same way? The knobby parts of his wrist?

  He wasn’t getting clumsy, though.

  He was getting slow. Numbers were slipping out of his head. Into my dead father’s mouth.

  The hickey was worse now too. Deeper, darker, rougher in a way that made me think of a cat’s tongue.

  I uncorked the tube, wet my index finger, and painted that red with heat.

  Dino tensed up, every muscle in his little body tensing, but he didn’t turn his head around.

  This wasn’t new to him.

  “It’s to make you better,” I whispered to him.