Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

  His eyes were squinched shut. He nodded yes, okay, do it, but I was done already.

  I nudged him with the back of my fingers.

  He looked up to me and breathed out, clear drool stringing down into his pillow in a way that made me think of lake water. The kind people drown in.

  Standing there, I promised myself that if I ever had kids, I was going to be different.

  It’s a promise every Indian kid makes at some point.

  You mean it when you say it, though. You mean it so hard.

  * * *

  The second time I saw my dead father cross from the kitchen doorway to the hall that led back to the utility room, and to my little brother’s room, it was technically my thirteenth birthday. With everything that had happened that week, the only one who remembered was my PE teacher. It was because we’d all had to put our birth dates on a fitness form, and he’d ordered them on the wall by those dates for some reason known only to PE teachers.

  Without him telling me, I might have forgotten too.

  My feet were cold, the beds of my toenails blue.

  This time I’d used shoelaces to crimp the circulation off. Because they make better knots. And I’d done each leg by itself so I wouldn’t fall over first thing.

  I couldn’t fake sleep, and couldn’t risk it since there was no trigger for sleepwalking that I knew, but I was tired from standing guard the last few nights. And from my face trying to knit itself back into some semblance of myself. I’d nodded off a time or two, I mean. At least I know I’d woken with my top lip dried to the window glass—the reason it was my top lip was that when a face eases forward to a window, and when the neck muscles abandon it in sleep, it slides down until the top lip rolls back to wet, stops that slow fall.

  When I licked my tongue back into my mouth, it tasted like metal. It didn’t make sense, but maybe glass doesn’t have its own taste. Maybe that’s why drinks come in it.

  What I wanted to do, it was dream. Or, no, I wanted more. I wanted to dream and to remember it.

  The next time I woke, it was because something had woke me, I knew.

  It’s a different kind of waking up when there’s still the ghost of a sound in the small bones of your ear.

  It was the floor in the living room, creaking.

  It meant Dad was solid now. That he had weight to give, and be careful of.

  Maybe he was just now realizing it too.

  At least, there hadn’t been a second creak yet.

  I could see his reflection in the glass, dim and close.

  Full regalia. The fancydancer he’d always meant to be.

  My dad.

  My throat was shaking. My heart would be his drumbeat.

  “When you died,” I told him, like I’d been saving up since I was four, “I was all crying. You probably know. But it wasn’t for you. I was crying because Mom was crying. I was crying because of your sisters. I couldn’t even remember what you looked like, until the wake.”

  No response.

  But—I was listening with every part of my body—there was a breath, finally.

  He was learning that again too, then.

  “And Deener, he doesn’t even remember you at all,” I said.

  My plan was for this to core him out somehow. But my plan, it hinged on him still caring about us.

  Really, he only needed us to convert into a future he’d already assumed was going to be real.

  Not if I could help it.

  I turned around all at once, the superhero action figure held tight in my fist like a weapon—I had no idea what it could do to him, just that it was connected, that because part of it had passed through Dino, it mattered, was some sort of tether—but he was gone, had kept on walking. Maybe seconds and seconds ago.

  If he was solid enough to creak, to breathe, then maybe this was the last night, then. Maybe this was the night he drank Dino dry, left him open-eyed and dead in his bed, another tragedy at the poverty line.

  And because Dino had already been slowing down, or, really, topping out, he was the only one Dad could take from, finally. It made Dino have something inside him that I didn’t have, that Mom didn’t have.

  Still, Dino having to die like that, us trying to deal with it, to keep living—it wouldn’t happen.

  Mom would collapse into herself a hundred times a day, wouldn’t be able to work any shifts for a year, for two, and I would walk down to the bus stop with a two-by-four, and I wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left of any of them down there. And then the sheriff’s deputy would come for me like he’d always known he’d have to someday, and Mom would take off with me in the Buick, just driving straight across the pasture, for the mountains, for the memory of mountains, both her hands on the steering wheel, and this is already the way Indians have been dying for forever.

  And it would be Dad killing us.

  I shook my head no against all of that and ran for the hall, made it just in time to see Dad come reeling out of Dino’s room, his mouth open wide, so I could see that it wasn’t teeth in there at all but wrinkly black muscle, like a worm.

  What he was recoiling from, what he was trying to brush away from his mouth, it was the heat I’d left there. The cinnamon, the mace.

  In order to make a connection as deep as he was making with Dino, he had to touch the most raw part of himself to that tight skin behind Dino’s ear.

  I hadn’t even planned on him getting that far, though.

  We were supposed to still be having a big standoff in the living room.

  What was supposed to happen, it was me striding right past him into the kitchen, and dunking that superhero into the dishwater Mom had left for the pans to soak in.

  He’d drowned once, my father. I was going to drown him again.

  He was going to stand there in the living room and spit up white, bubbly water, and he was going to fall to his knees, reach out for me to stop. But I wouldn’t.

  I didn’t even have a real plan for what to do with his body, with the corpse that was not going to make any sense at all to Mom, but first was killing him. After that, I would figure the rest out.

  Only, now, he was banging back in the hall. Into the back door.

  It flapped open and he held on to both sides for a moment, long enough for me to see that his eyes weren’t shiny black anymore. The pupils or irises or whatever were still too big, bigger than human, what you’d probably need for living in the dead space under a house, but there was some white at the edges now too.

  It was how I could tell he was looking at me.

  It was how I could see everything he wanted to do to me.

  I ran ahead, my arms already straightened, and pushed him the rest of the way out, then stood there, my chest heaving.

  He didn’t fall up into the sky. There wasn’t any rule about that, evidently. He could be outside or he could be inside.

  Because he was solid now, though, that meant gravity could pull on him.

  He’d fallen backwards down the steps, had landed hard on the packed dirt. Meaning there was still time for me to rush and fall back to the kitchen, dunk the superhero in the dishwater and hold it there. But, it would take two, three minutes to work, wouldn’t it?

  Those would be two or three minutes I wouldn’t have a line of sight on him. Two or three minutes he could have with Dino.

  It might be all he needed.

  I slammed the superhero into the weather-strip edge of the doorframe face first, but nothing happened.

  No choice, then. The kitchen. I had to try.

  When Dad took his first step toward me, I was already falling back, one hand to the paneling in the hall, to guide me to the glow of the range light Mom always left on, the only part of the stove that always worked when you hit the button.

  I swayed my back away from the thick fingertips reaching for me, and it threw me enough off balance that I slipped on the linoleum of the kitchen, hit a chair, sent it tumbling into the living room, my right hand already clawing for the handle of
the refrigerator door. I caught it as barely as I’d ever caught anything, but then the door opened and I slung out farther with it, Dad’s knee or shoulder or head slamming the door, stopping it dead in its arc.

  It shut back hard, taking its light with it, and the fingerprints of my middle and ring finger, it felt like, and then Dad was standing there, his regalia making him so much taller than the refrigerator, the darkness making him still a silhouette.

  I’d fallen with my back to the cabinet, a sharp metal handle digging into my shoulder.

  “Not—not Deener,” I said, and pushed one hand up behind me, like to use that hand to pull myself up.

  But what that hand was holding was the superhero action figure.

  It slipped into the cold water, and then—

  * * *

  —and then the water, it was lapping all around us. Around both of us.

  It was night. Outside. And the air was crisper somehow. No: thinner.

  We were on the reservation.

  It was trees all around, except under us right now. Under us right now, there was water.

  We were in the shallows of the lake, and—and I was taller, I was grown. I couldn’t see my face, but my hands, my arms, my boots, I didn’t know them. I’d never known them.

  And then it hit me: the same way that, when sleepwalking, I was kind of inhabiting myself, that’s what I was doing here. Just, now I was inhabiting someone else. Someone before. Someone who had sneaked up on a dying campfire by walking around the whole edge of the lake, numbing his feet, leaving him open for me to inhabit. Someone who had been looking for my dad ever since my dad had left a certain truck in the ditch, a rod thrown through the block.

  I had access to this truck owner’s memories, too, and remembered them like they’d happened to me: two days ago, Dad—“Park” in this memory—had come over because he knew where a moose was. He’d seen it twice over the last week. Twice.

  This wasn’t some big dumb cow, either, my dad had said. Park had said. This was a proper bull.

  Forget the meat. That kind of rack, Park knew a guy down in the city who would go fifteen hundred for it, in velvet like that. He already had the rifle borrowed, and already had a chainsaw himself. All he needed now was a truck, so he could stake out that curve by the little pond, then pop them a high-dollar moose, saw the head off, carry it direct to that guy he knew, the rack wrapped in plastic bags so all the velvet wouldn’t dry up, blow away before he could get there.

  Fifteen hundred, split two ways.

  And he’d said he’d return the truck with a full tank of gas, even.

  It was easy money. The easiest money.

  Just like that, even though I knew better, I’d worked the square-headed key off my ring, passed it across, and didn’t see the truck again until four days later. Until yesterday.

  It had been on the side of the road, abandoned, walked away from.

  There wasn’t an actual rod thrown through the hood, but I’d figured that part out soon enough.

  I hadn’t gone back to work that afternoon, or all day today.

  Park had been hunting a moose. Now I was hunting Park.

  Where I found him was sitting by a dying fire, beer cans lined in a circle all around it. Just, on the way to finding him, he became Dad. Not because he’d changed. Because I had.

  I stood there in the water, watching him like a spirit come up from the deep.

  When he looked up, he even said my name: “Junior.” Then he said it three more times, softer and softer: “Junior Junior Junior.”

  Every fourth person on our reservation, that’s their name, like the same stupid person is trying life after life until he gets it right at last.

  Still, this Junior was me, now, not the one he’d loaned the truck to. Maybe it was because we had the same name that I was able to go back, inhabit him, be him, or maybe that action figure, this was his heroic power—to grant the one thing that can save a little brother.

  Dad offered me his beer and I swatted it away, liked this new strength, this new, adult reach.

  Right now, the four-year-old me was twenty miles south, dying from pneumonia—maybe from how cold it was where this me was standing right now.

  There are rules, I know.

  Not knowing them doesn’t mean they don’t apply to you.

  I couldn’t stop looking at him either, my dad. Not just from this other Junior’s height, but at all.

  This was the Dad that Mom had known. That she had loved. That she had thought was going to last forever.

  He was still young. Stupid too, you could tell just from the way his eyes were, you could tell from his loopy grin, but he would get better. He would figure this all out. He would come home, wouldn’t he? All his sisters told my mom he would. She just had to wait.

  “It wasn’t there, man,” he said, shrugging.

  “The moose or the truck?” I must have said, since I heard myself saying it, even though it wasn’t my voice.

  “Third gear,” my dad said back, snuffling a laugh out, and like that, I had crossed to him right through the dead fire, was kneeing him in the face. He rolled backwards out of his trashed-out lawn chair and I went with him, my arm a piston, my fist the hammer at the end of it.

  Dad, though, he wasn’t even fighting back. That was the thing. He just kept holding his hands out to the side, saying this was okay, he deserved this, do my worst. It was like—it was like he knew who was inside this Junior. Like he couldn’t fight back, since it was his son. Like he knew he deserved this for what he hadn’t even done yet. Like he knew I’d dove into a sink miles and years away, come up in the shallows of this lake.

  I don’t know what he thought, finally. I don’t know what he knew.

  Just that I had to save Dino. No matter how much it hurt.

  I pushed Dad back as hard as I could, and he sat down in the shallows of the lake, was still kind of laughing.

  “What are you . . . What are we doing, Junior, man?” he said, shaking the wet from his fingertips, his mouth running blood down onto his chest.

  I stood there in front of him, the cold water lapping over my feet, and knew this could end now. That it should end here. It was just a truck.

  But—maybe this is the way it had always been, every time this happened.

  For the truck, Junior was just going to deal out a beating, a shaming.

  To keep Dino safe, I was going to have to wade farther out.

  That’s why nobody ever got sent up for it. This is why Junior never told anybody about this—even whoever his girlfriend had been eight years ago.

  Because he didn’t know about it.

  He didn’t know the why of it.

  He was sleepwalking.

  There were just two people here in the shallows. Not three. Me and Dad. Me finally getting to see him as he was, as I’d always wanted to see him, as I’d always dreamed of seeing him. And then having to step forward, knee him hard enough in the face that a line of blood slings up behind and above him.

  He falls into the water, and the blood goes out farther.

  And then I’m on him, my knee to his chest, my hands to his face, to push it back, to push it under the surface.

  It’s for leaving us. It’s for coming back.

  I’m screaming right into the top of the water, and his eyes are open inches away, his hair floating all around, and then, right at the end, he opens his mouth, breathes in what he can’t.

  I hold him there for longer, to be sure. And then for longer after that, hugging him to me, which is probably a blurry image the other Junior still remembers in jagged bits. And then I push him out like a raft, and I slam my hand into the top of the water over and over, the splashing droplets stinging my face harder each time, but never hard enough.

  What floats in around me, from behind me, are porcupine quills, and feathers, and plastic beads.

  I stand away from all that, and when I look back—

  * * *

  —it’s to an empty kitchen, miles and year
s away from then.

  But there’s water on the floor where Dad was standing.

  I edge closer to it, then rush past it, sure that where he’s retreated, it’s to Dino’s room, because he can fix all this, because it’s not too late.

  Where he is, it’s through the back door, the wooden steps wet with his staggering footprints. Where he is, it’s facedown against the packed dirt, his hand reaching ahead of him.

  This is what it’s like to kill your father.

  This is what it’s like to kill everything your father could have been, if only the world hadn’t found him, done its thing to him.

  “Don’t come back again,” I said down to him, my throat filling with tears like I was drowning too, and then Dino was standing beside me in his nightshirt, his expression emptier than it should have been. Even if he didn’t recognize Dad, still, there was a dead man in full fancydance regalia lying dead in the dirt four feet from us.

  It was all the same to Dino.

  “One, two, three, four,” he said, one side of his mouth smiling.

  He said it again—“Four”—and I tracked where he was wanting me to look.

  Standing just past where Dad was dead, there were the shapes of four dogs.

  The yellowy-white one padded forward, pushed its nose into Dad’s neck, and I breathed in fast, let go of Dino’s hand so I could put my palm to his chest, to keep him from trying to pet the pretty dogs.

  They were anything but.

  Not only had they died weeks ago, but when they’d come back together, it had been in a pile, in whatever pit the deputy sheriff had dumped them in.

  The yellowy-one had the front leg of the black-and-tan one and the body of the brindle.

  They were all like that, their legs just enough different lengths to make their movements awkward.

  But they got where they were going. And they remembered who had done this to them.

  Like all animals, they went for the soft pieces first—the gut, the tongue—and when Dad’s porcupine-quill bustle was in the way, one of them grabbed it in its jaws, pulled it away. Instead of coming untied, it peeled from the muscle.

  The regalia wasn’t ornament, it was part of him. It was what he’d been growing.

  Maybe when he just started out, when he was just an impulse, coming back, all he’d had to go on was that dim shape of what he’d meant to be. No clear lines between what he was wearing and what he was.