Farewell Navigator

by Leni Zumas

  But the sacrificed car and my hasty departure were better things to tell him than nothing at all, than a frightening silence, than long days of wondering where I slept at night. I have a roof, I planned to say, for now. I have a friend. For now it’s all right. I will let you know what happens.

  THIEVES AND MAPMAKERS

  On the last day I saw my mother, we ate dinner on the back porch. Veal chops and butter beans and apricots in syrup. Flies swarmed around the fruit but my mother said to ignore them, so we chewed and chewed and she asked about work. My job was at the fairgrounds, running the Demon Cups. I would listen to the kids scream for three minutes then pull the lever back. I watched for accidents.

  I don’t like it, I told her.

  Oh, well, you do! she said, popping a fly-pocked apricot into her mouth.

  I don’t like the job.

  But you do like the job.

  The calm in her voice made me tired. That summer I was tired all the time. My spine had twisted into knots from the tedium of running up my body. My eyes ached from looking at things I had already seen. I had an unnamed sickness that scaled my skin and brittled my eyeballs, but being sick was more pleasurable than being bored and I felt more interesting, in my affliction, than my mother and the neighbors content with their strong lungs and straight spines and useless health.

  I believed the Town itself had infected me. Although it looked clean on the surface, it was like a river that’s quit running, whose water languishes on the rocks, collecting germs. Because nothing in the Town ever changed shape, hidden viruses were allowed to grow. The rooms of my house stank of sameness; the familiar pall of the slipcovers had become a daily torment. It wasn’t city, it wasn’t country, it was a way station of gray streets and brown storefronts and paralyzed faces.

  In those hot guts of August I would wake up drenched with fears of waking in the Town until I died. My sweat smelled like rust.

  On the day I turned eleven, I had asked why my father was missing from yet another of my birthday parties. My mother explained that when he left, four winters before, he never did find his way back to us. I imagined my father coughing up knobs of phlegm, hobbled by gangrene, heels printing blood in the snow, unable to find the right road. Like my father, most Town natives got swallowed up by the outside world if they agreed to step into it. Kids off to college stayed away for good; two-week vacations turned into permanent leaves; fortune-seekers, once departed, were rarely seen again. As a result, the Town’s population was dwindling steadily. One of the high schools had already been shut down. The dentists had moved away for lack of patients and we walked around with bad teeth.

  After the birthday cake was gone I found a state map and stared at the little square south of Springfield that the Town was supposed to occupy. The space lay empty. The Town was not listed in the index. I was shocked to learn, at eleven years of age, that I did not live anywhere. I told myself there had been an error at the map factory and from that point on scrutinized every map I could get ahold of, assuming there must be some record of our existence. I worked diligently to collect them—stained scrolls from antique stores, cheap laminates from gas stations—and pasted them into notebooks. I had maps from every continent, world atlases and national cartographs I’d sent away for. If I had to live in an invisible city I wanted at least to own charted proof of places that did exist.

  At the Laundromat I found Lily. We had been meeting there almost every night of the summer to buy coffees and spend quarters on pinball. Our patterns of migration were reliable.

  I heard a kid say there’s something happening at the Y.

  Like what, I said.

  Something, I don’t know, who cares? Finish this. Lily handed me the coffee cup and snapped open her compact and we drove lipstick on. We look fucking smashing! she declared and we ran down the slope behind the Laundromat to cut across the park, the wind lifting our dresses.

  The YMCA gym usually stayed empty, but that night its windows were blazing when we walked up. A handful of kids had collected at the door’s mouth. Lily and I took our place among them, those kids in brown lace-up shoes and denim jackets who shared with us the same bad luck of getting born nowhere.

  It’s a concert, one of them said.

  There had never been a concert in the Town. Live music only happened if there was a wedding.

  A charcoal van plowed up the drive and four boys stepped out. They might have been angels, weird as they looked to us. We stared at their two-colored hair, stiff with pomade, and at the four matching black bullrings in their sunburnt noses. (No one had seen a bullring except in magazines; none among us had ever attempted one, not even the kids who tattooed calligraphy on their knuckles or carved symbols into their forearms with heated-up knives.) These boys wore long velvet coats, studded belts, striped trousers with buttons at the calf, and box-heeled boots you couldn’t have purchased within a three-hundred mile radius of where they now stood.

  Like pirates, breathed Lily.

  Inside the gym, a red glow from the exit signs turned their bodies into black paper cutouts. While they fussed with the amplifiers we waited dutifully, grateful for this unexplained gift of disruption.

  Their music was tuneless and played at volumes so high the notes could not separate themselves and were left for dead under the static. I could not pretend to like it, but I was enthralled. The gunfire decibels, the stuttering howls, their dripping mouths, the grisly discomfort of the chords: together it announced, in no uncertain terms, Your life is not happy and neither is mine. Inside the frantic noise the singer hovered and slouched, spitting out wails at random and only opening his eyes between songs, to scan the meager audience, to lift his chin at us. He was the only one I watched. He was not good-looking in the way singers are supposed to be. As a little boy he had probably been winsome and soft-eyed—poised to grow into a handsome man—but now his face was bruisey, gutted. I imagined his parents’ dismay as they watched his skin go bad, his eyes shrink to slits. There were traces of boyish beauty underneath the wreckage, so faint they served only to magnify the beauty’s vanishing. Yet he possessed a quality more attractive—to me—than handsomeness: it was his sheer haggardness, the battered-ship’s-hull look he wore, as if a lifetime of senseless routines had etched gulleys in his cheeks.

  He looked sicker than I felt.

  After the applause, everyone shifted weight in embarrassment, still dumbfounded as to why these creatures had come into our midst. The singer barked into the microphone: We are collecting donations, as much as you can give, please dig deep because we are far from home and need gas money. Thank you!

  He picked up a coffee can and began making the rounds. Lily rifled through her plastic purse for quarters. God, I wish I had more. Only got two-seventy-five here. . . .

  I’m not giving them anything, I said.

  But you have to! she hissed. They came all this way.

  Well, they’re making a mint off everyone else.

  I had been watching my schoolmates hand them dollar bills, even fives—for a few minutes of bad music—and sensed keenly the not-so-veiled insult in it, the pirates’ assumption that we, a group of shambling hicks, would happily fork over our last coins for the pleasure of their company.

  When the singer got to us, Lily cast her eyes down and whimpered, Y’all played really badass.

  Thank you, madam, he said briskly, holding out the can to me.

  Come on, said Lily. Give him something.

  I’m broke, I said.

  Oh really, said the singer. Or is it just you didn’t like us? Got more of a taste for country music?

  No, I don’t like country.

  He smiled, took a flask from his jacket, and unscrewed it. You know what, neither do I.

  I smiled back, sipping from the proffered flask. It hurt my throat. Somebody turned on the gym lights and we all looked around anxiously.

  Guess it’s time, the singer said, to take our leave.

  In their van, my ears rang from the music and the
large amounts of whiskey made available to me by Squinch. (I wondered what kind of regular name his mother had given him.) I looked around for Lily, convinced she had been with me the whole time, but through the smeared glass I saw the lawn abandoned, the parking lot empty. Squinch was slumped against the door with a dyed-blue forelock hanging across his cheek. Beside him squatted the drummer, scowling as he counted money from the can. Not the most lucrative shit hole, he muttered. Remind me never to book a show in Springfield again.

  This is not Springfield, I said.

  Where the hell is it, then?

  Springfield’s forty miles—

  You’re lying.

  No.

  The drummer hollered, Which one of you fuckwits booked this show?

  They bickered for a few minutes before losing interest in the fact that they had come here to take our money entirely by accident. I wanted to tell them to get a good look around since they’d never be able to find this place again.

  The other boys clambered up into the seats to prepare for departure and I was light-headed with envy at what they had in store: new roads, strange cities, a different sun rising each morning. They were going, they said, to New Orleans. A big show awaited them there.

  Squinch slid his fingers through a rip in my stocking, rested a nail briefly against my thigh, then ventured his whole hand through and promised to buy me new stockings any color I wanted. He began whispering things. The drummer had started the engine, which sputtered so grievously I couldn’t hear a word.

  My mother abandoned us, he shrieked. Me and my sisters all under the age of six, she just took off. I think she lives in California now.

  Water stood in his eyes, but it wasn’t tears.

  I shouted that I was sorry.

  He grinned and asked if I had any room in my heart for a motherless boy. I shrugged, drunk. Hey fellows, Squinch yelled up to them, I like this little one. I think we might take her. You’d like to get stolen, wouldn’t you?

  We drove. It was black and starless. Even in my stupor I was careful to memorize the route, the exact roads taken, the billboards and landmarks passed, because I needed to chart with precision any venture that took me away from the Town. It was bolstering to know the details of my whereabouts outside a place that was not anywhere. I had my backpack which held the drugstore notebook sticky with glue and shreds of maps; as soon as there was light to see by I would sketch in a new one, the one I was drawing in my head, fat black lines between stars-for-towns dipping across blue lines for rivers and the van itself a bright red circle flying down the page, destined for locations I had only seen on other maps.

  I must have slept. The van still throttled along but now everything was steeped in glare and the waxing heat of midmorning. There were mountains on our right and the road reached ahead into a little valley with colors more vivid than any I had witnessed at home: dazzling aquas and limes, rich muddy reds, the gleamy transparent silver of the air itself. It was like watching a movie. The gray-scale filter I was used to had been lifted clean.

  Where are we? I asked Squinch. He had his head on my thigh and was smoking with his eyes closed.

  I don’t know. Every highway on earth looks the same, he added mournfully, as you will soon discover.

  I learned that these pirates were plagued by their own special sort of illness. The only foods they could stand to eat were potatoes and toasted bread products. They got nauseous at the mention of vegetables or anything that came from an animal. Instead of eating they plied their stomachs with stay-awake medicine. On the floor of the van, spilled coffee had soaked into little wax packets and powder-flecked ziplocks. All four boys, I noticed, were twitching constantly, glancing around with fretful eyes. This agitation made me feel closer to them. Their translucent skin, the dried sputum at the corners of their mouths, and the way their shrunken muscles hung as if ready to come off the bone meant they were nothing like the normal people I’d grown up with. I started laughing from the pleasure of being among people who had something wrong with them. Squinch looked at me suspiciously, maybe thinking I was crazy because I laughed at nothing but was so quiet the rest of the time. I assumed he had seen plenty of lunatics in his travels and would prefer them, in their illness, to the lackluster of the healthy sane.

  The night sky was lanced by lightning, shards of wind. We waited on the thunder in the asphalt lot behind a truckstop cafeteria and the boys placed wagers (size of storm, duration of storm, what particular shit might get fucked up by storm). Innocent rapture crinkled their snouts. The water hammered dents in the roof of the van. Squinch jumped out and dragged me with him into the soak, dancing off-balance, threatening to relieve my arm of its socket.

  In the men’s room we dripped and shivered. He lifted me onto the sink—the gun-mouth faucet at the small of my back—and hoisted my legs around him, gnawing my collarbone, snorting and giggling. He pinched my breasts between his fingers and said, Love of Christ they’re so little!

  Cold beads of humiliation sprang up on my cheeks; I kept my eyes on the ceiling.

  But then your nipples, he went on in a surgeon’s voice, are the longest I ever saw.

  Holding him there, bracing my leg muscles so he wouldn’t fall, I calculated the distance I had traveled from home.

  He clawed at the buttons of his shirt. This is my heart, he instructed, pressing me to listen against his damp chest. I felt the ridges meet my cheek: knobby, corrugated flesh.

  I drew back, forgetting not to breathe, and gagged at the urine waft. What’s that?

  Well, love, it’s a little scar, you see. Thick and bruise-colored, a crosshatch of notched lumps, it stretched from sternum to armpit. A frayed black thread poked out from one end (the stitches, still intact), and looking closer I noticed that the hewn sheaths of skin on either side had not grown together, instead relying wholly on the black thread to secure them.

  Don’t be scared, Squinch said.

  But.

  It doesn’t hurt me.

  But.

  It’s cool if you touch it. I’d like you to touch it. He held my fingertip and moved it lightly over the fibrous bumps. Just whatever you do, love. . . . I sat unbreathing. Never, ever pull the thread. Promise not to?

  Yes.

  Say it.

  I promise.

  Good girl.

  Then he found his way into me and stayed there for a minute or two. I stared at the sooty green tiles on the opposite wall, waiting for what would happen, not feeling anything beyond a cautious pressure. He withdrew and whispered, Good girl and buttoned his shirt.

  I kept track of our coordinates in the notebook. The name of each town we passed through was entered into my ledger, the villages of Missouri and Arkansas and Tennessee and Mississippi inscribed in back-slanted lettering. I would wake up before the others and make a map of the day before. We would be bunched up in the van or splayed across couches in a fourteen-year-old’s parents’ basement, and it would be late in the morning when regular people have already arrived at their regular jobs and are following the dreary mandate of proper living. The boys, like good invalids, slept their choked sleeps well into the afternoon and allowed me time to commit our journey to paper. With colored pencils I sketched the scenery. Drought-cooked riverbeds littered with birds’ skeletons; three tiny sisters on a Memphis sidewalk rigged up in Elvis costumes lip-synching to a tape of “Blue Suede Shoes”; a road of roofless houses, acting as if nothing had happened to them, their backyards fluttering with clean laundry.

  During the final stretch through Louisiana, a warm rain fell. We drove along in it, all of us twisted up in unnatural positions to prevent our moist calves from touching one another, until without warning Squinch pulled over into the mud, flung the door open, and bowed his blue head. Raindrops sprayed against his thighs. He drew ragged breaths, mimicking the death-rattle, held his hands to his ears and rocked back and forth.

  These theatrics persisted until Rabb nudged me, hissing, Somebody else’s got to drive.

  Cra
wling out from the piles of backpacks and drum shells I caught my dress on the door ashtray; at the sound of its ripping they all laughed gleefully. Squinch stretched out in the passenger seat, his fit subsiding as suddenly as it had begun.

  The rain had cleared by the time we crossed the swamps into New Orleans. Through the gloom I steered, teeth chattering with fatigue, past crumbling balustrades, sunken lawns, glittering vines that crawled up the walls of ornate and dismal houses lying still under the heat. The boys, accustomed to milder mid-Atlantic summers, sweated madly in their vintage jackets but were too vain to remove them. I had come to fear their vanity, the relish with which these pirates fondled their silken trousers as they slid them on and the hours spent oiling the thorns of their hair and examining themselves in the rearview mirror, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. I knew that when Squinch gave me his sunglasses to wear, it was in order to see his reflection in them when he bent to kiss me.

  On a street that frothed with palm trees and pink flowers, we pulled up to the Mausoleum, home of Bill Bones—renowned on tour circuits, said the boys, for his excellent parties and encyclopedic knowledge of musical history. Opening the door was a pale, red-eyed stick in sweatpants who trembled as he whispered, What time is it?

  Uh. . . .

  Don’t receive callers before three. Come back later.

  But we’re the band.

  Did you nawt hear me? Back at three! And the door closed resolutely, shuddering on its hinges.

  We found a café on a street of gas stations. The waiter stood in martyrdom while the boys complained there was nothing but eggs on the menu. Squinch snapped, Just bring us some fucking coffee please because we can’t eat any of this chickenshit! and five minutes later, fueled, they fled the café in a blur of black legs and white arms whirled with skulls and ships and fire. I paid the bill and was ridiculed for it afterward in the dim bar where the boys drank Hurricanes steadily for the next several hours.