by Ann Pancake
Their breaths steam around them while Daddy quivers the key in the side door padlock. Mish encases himself deeper in the coat, higher in it, his hands in his pockets to his forearms, his shoulders hackled to his ears. The man in Daddy is full raised now, Mish can see him, behind Daddy’s bones. The man is flat and black, out of heavy construction paper snipped, a shape only, and only recently has Mish learned, from a Marvel Comics coloring book, the man’s name: Quickshiver. The lock unslots, and Mish trails Daddy through the dim, stale kitchen, into the window-blanketed front room, dark as a groundhog burrow, and Mish, coat whispering, feels right away with his feet for the men he left on the floor last Sunday. Daddy squats to prime the kerosene heater, a stubborn cast-off of Gran and Pappy’s, and all around Mish, as ever-present and familiar as the house’s sour smell, presses the house’s black burring, a static not ear-heard in the way Quickshiver is not eye-seen. Mish finds a man, then two, with his toes, and then he stands still, careful not to smash. With the men safe, he can let down a little, take his hands from the coat. He can feel Bob Marley behind him on the wall, tracing warm the rim of the star on his coat. The heater finally flares, Daddy scrambles upright, and in the pink-orange glow, Mish does his quick accounting: the Blue Power Ranger, Spiderman, the Hulk, Dash Incredible, Luke Skywalker, and a swarm of tiny knights. Mish’s shoulders ease.
Then he turns around, and out of the dark, Bob soars. Bob a beam through the static, radiant and still, and although the heater lights only Bob’s chest, chin, and mouth, Mish sees the rest clear. Bob has made his face the colors he likes, red, yellow, and green, something Mish’d like to do, something even Jesus cannot, and under the toboggan hat-thing, Mish knows, three little birds nest in Bob’s blacksnake hair. Bob does not worry, you see it in his smile, smoke curling it like Santa Claus’s in Gran’s Night Before Christmas book, only Bob is real. When Mish turns away, he feels the heat again on his back, and he starts to kneel to his men, to reach, when a hand closes over his shoulder.
“C’mon, buddy. Let’s eat.”
Mish sits cross-legged on the kitchen table with a bowl between his legs, gulping Froot Loops as fast as he can. Daddy is watching the window, dipping into a mustard jar some pickle loaf slices he’s rolled into tubes, a Budweiser humming in his other hand. Quickshiver crouches. Between bites, Daddy rubs his eyes, pulls now and again on their lids. Mish blinks. Daddy has opened the oven door for heat. They eat in the red U of its element and in a disk of light from a small, goose-necked desk lamp. The room is off the road, but from the side window where Daddy sits, you can see a car’s headlights glint off the aluminum NO HUNTING sign tacked to the fence before the car pulls up by the house. Mish hits the bottom of his bowl and slides off the table.
“Keep that overhead off,” Daddy says. He watches the window.
Mish stands in the dark doorway. From the floor, the men pull, invisible. To see them at all, he’ll have to sit very near the hot cylinder of heater, but right after he thinks that, it doesn’t matter anymore. Kneeling, he draws the Silver Surfer and the Power Ranger from his pockets and sets them among the others in their scattered circle. The air over the men is static-less, Mish can feel, and glassy. The black burring pushed up and away. For the first time since this morning, he wriggles out of his coat and lets it drop behind him. Bob has his back. He picks up the Hulk.
The calm almost instantly comes, like a vein from the Hulk into Mish’s palm, then up his arm to his heart. The other men begin pulling, showing Mish, and Mish knows what to do. He divides them into the sides they ask for, setting them up for their fight, and as he does, the glassy dome settles, Mish barely notices it with his mind, but the rest of him knows. The dome cupping over, embracing, and inside, only Mish and the men. And soon, Mish hears the murmur, the quiet telling, it comes from his mouth and at the same time from outside of him—
“Mish! C’mere!”
Mish stops.
“Mish!” An amplified hiss. “C’mere!”
Mish leans back. He looks at his men. Then, pulling on his coat, he climbs to his feet and rustles to the kitchen.
Daddy’s face is squashed against the window glass. “Look out here.” Daddy reaches behind him and snaps off the lamp. Mish rests his chin on the sill and circles his face with his hands like Daddy is doing.
“Look hard. Let your eyes adjust.”
Mish stretches big his eyes.
“Do you see something? There by the sycamore?”
Mish strains.
“Somebody moving?”
“I jush see a buncha weedj.”
“You’re sure?”
Mish looks a little longer, for the sake of Quickshiver. “Nuh-uh. Nuttin dere, Daddy.”
Daddy angles his hands around his face, desperate to confirm it. When Mish turns back to his men, Daddy gives up and follows to his own front room spot, the straight chair with the stained pillow drawn up to a crack between blanket-drape and window-frame. He lights his nerve medicine. Mish strips off his coat and studies his men. Half of them sleep in the roofless Lincoln Log house, the other half in the Hot Wheels garage. It is Spiderman wants to be picked up first. Mish does.
Again, the immediate grounding, the vein from man to heart. Whoever Mish holds in his hand, he enters, the man pulling, a speaking way under words, Mish simultaneously following the man and directing him. The men strap on their weapons, pump their muscles, toss back their heads—the Hulk, Luke, Spidey, Knight—Mish both Mish and men and more, the dome settling good now, the block of the black burr. The further he sinks, the calmer he deeps, the good real weight of the men’s real world, anchor weight, ballast weight, so different from the daddy weight. Mish speaking not only the men’s parts, but the story in between, and always, every word of the murmur understood. Now the men are shouting challenges to each other, girding for the fight, Mish and the men completely endomed, Bob unworrying overhead like a tricolor moon. The first man dies, the second one, the first man resurrects, the dome holding away—
“Mish! Do you have to pee?”
Mish’s mouth crackles, two knights crashing.
“Mish, I said, do you have to pee?”
Mish blows out a breath and sits back on his thighs. While one hand has been moving the men, the other has been holding his crotch. “Uh-uh,” he mutters, almost to himself.
“Yeah, you do. Do you want me to come up with you?”
He’s let go of his pants and picked up Spiderman, trying to follow him back.
“Mish, do you want me to come?” The voice sharpens. “I’m not cleaning up another mess, I’ll tell you that.”
“Nooo,” Mish groans.
“Well, watch that hole. Hear me?”
Up the dark, narrow steps, Mish climbs. The hole in the bathroom floor finally opened all the way through a month ago. The hole’s right in front of the toilet, so to pee, you have to straddle it, which Daddy can do, or you have to sidle around and pee from the side, which Mish has to do. Many a time, in daylight, Mish has squatted over the hole and peered down to the stove. Its black coils, its scaley, unwashed pans, the streaked dishtowels borrowed from Gran. Once he dropped a man through to see what would happen, one of the faceless olive army men—he wouldn’t have done it to most of the others. When it hit the stovetop, Daddy jumped and cussed. Sometimes, looking through, Mish imagines the what-if of falling himself and frying on a burner. Sometimes, in the night, the bathroom lit, the downstairs dark, like now, Mish sees the hole as not dropping into Daddy’s kitchen at all. Mish sees it leading right out of the house to someplace else.
THE DAY AFTER Christmas Mish stood on the footstool in the bathroom off Gran’s kitchen, his men battling in the sink. Through the dome arched over them, the shut bathroom door, Mish heard Gran and Uncle David walk into the kitchen and their chairs scrape. Then the grown-up talk, of no more import than the toilet running, as Rescue Hatchet dove off the faucet to save Dash from Darth—when, suddenly, Mish heard his real name. He stopped.
It was Uncle David, of c
ourse, who said it. Uncle David, who only came twice a year, at most, twice a year, if that. And now he was saying it again, in a string of words Mish couldn’t reverse and unscramble.
“Steve is thirty-eight years old, Mom. Thirty-eight years old. And has never held a job longer than, what? Three months?”
“Well, he looks better than he has in years. And just happier than he’s ever been—”
“Looks better than he has in years with his two front teeth rotted out.”
Through Mish, a coldness was unrolling. Starting in his chest, uncurling even into his arms and his legs.
“You know what I mean. Good color in his face. And not all skinny like he has been.”
Mish hunched back over the sink, his mouth moving. Rescue Hatchet hacked at Spiderman now.
“. . . don’t understand why nothing’s come of what happened last summer.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, David, the court system in this county, it’s unbelievable how busy they are. At the magistrate’s, I heard they’re backed up for six months . . .”
Mish made his murmur louder.
“Did you and Dad really press those charges? Or did you just say you did?”
“He’s doing better than he has in so, so long. Why, he walked in here yesterday morning with a wrapped present in his hand—”
“Mom, did you press those charges?” Uncle David asked.
Mish threw open the bathroom door and leapt into the kitchen. “Boo!” He landed with a smack on both feet. Uncle David’s and Gran’s faces snapped towards him like they were fixed on the same pivot. “Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Mish bellowed his best villain laugh. After a couple seconds, Uncle David laughed, too.
“C’mere, Matthew. C’mon. Give me a hug. I’m leaving this afternoon.”
“Don’t pay any attention to Uncle David,” Daddy tells him every time. “He thinks he’s better than us.”
Mish grinned, shook his head, and ran.
DOWNSTAIRS, THE PHONE rings. Mish freezes. The insides of his ears stand up like a dog’s. He lowers himself closer to the floor hole, head tilted. Hears only a wordless rumble spiked here and there by a snicker. He tiptoes to the top of the stairs, but he can tell nothing from there, either. He waits.
“Hey, Mish,” Daddy calls. “Get down here get your coat on. We gotta take a quick ride.”
Mish’s chest clenches. He backs up a few steps and leans into the dark wall, the plaster cold against his cheek.
“It’s not a big deal. You can sleep while we’re there. And Tater should be around.”
Mish breathes deep and blows it loud enough for Daddy to hear, his lips flapping like a horse’s.
“C’mon, Mish, it’s not a big deal. I’m not gonna stay long.”
“Can I sleep in da car?”
“No, it’s too cold for you to sleep in the car.”
“Daaa-deee.”
“Listen, it’ll be a nice ride. We’ll listen to Bob. And afterwards, we’ll stop at Burger King to get you that new toy.”
“Wha new toy?”
“I can’t remember, I saw it on TV at Gran’s. Some kind of man. Now come on down.”
“I din see it on teebee at Mommysh.”
“Well, I saw it. Get your coat on.”
Mish stops on each step, brings his feet together, sighs. When he shuffles into the front room, he sees that Daddy has already swapped the threadbare Stihl cap for the newer one with the Nike swoosh. He’s pulling on the canvas coat he got when the Salvation Army came in for the flood victims over in Maddox last year. His usual coat, the one with the tape over the holes to hold in the stuffing, lies on the floor, worryingly close to the men. When Daddy tugs Mish to him, Mish droops, his arms limp, head sagging, and while Daddy threads him into the Dallas Cowboys sleeves, Mish wrinkles his nose against the reek of spilled kerosene in Daddy’s coat. Then Daddy is dueling with the zipper, hands buzzing, the cussing a steady grit, but over his shoulder, Mish notices Bob, heater-lit on the wall. Daddy glares at his own hands, stiffens and shakes them. Tries the zipper again. Mish watches Bob, tall and easy on his wall, the smoke from his smile, Mish knows—happiness. Bob can make the feeling seen. The star on Mish’s back starts to heat, then to ray, and finally the anticipation of Bob in the car overrides what waits at the end. “Your zipper’s broke,” Daddy says. Mish stoops quick, snatches the two nearest men, and stuffs one in each pocket.
They hurtle past the NO HUNTING sign. They hairpin back up Bonehaul Ridge. With each yard of asphalt collapsing behind, Quickshiver inside Daddy lies a little more down, the safety of being between place and place, Mish knows this without knowing whose knowing it is. They chute through trees, the house static receding, then burst out into a star-gray field, closer, closer, closer drawing to Bob, and when Mish pulls out the men and sees they are Luke Skywalker and Dash Incredible, he smiles. The Cavalier cuts loose on the first of the road’s few straights, and Mish can’t help but bounce in his seat; this is where Daddy always asks. And then Daddy does, he calls over his shoulder, Quickshiver nothing but a black puddle at his bottom, “What do you want to listen to, Mish?”
And Mish says, “Bob!”
And Daddy says, “Me, too!”
And Daddy steers with his thigh while he respools the cassette on his pinky, the men warming up in acrobatic leaps, until, finally, Daddy jabs the tape in the deck. And instantly, they are swallowed—Mish, men, Daddy—in the belly of Bob.
Rhythm of reggae, happy heartbeat and a half, Mish reeling it into the cave of his ribs, his pulse recalibrated, the soothe, the joy. The throb patterning, echoing, the loops of the curves, the hills’ nods and lifts, Mish swaying, the men flying, the car, Mish knows, if seen from outside, red green and yellow glow, colors of Bob. The Cavalier dances the bends, the banks, and Daddy stringy-sings, This is my message to you-ou-ou. And Mish’s happiness rides on a pillar of memory, sedimented, three years old. Last week, last month, yes, but down, back, further than that, to when Mish stayed at Daddy’s half the week, further back still to when Daddy lived at Mommy’s house. So much in those layers dark, dangly, shivery, loud, but all that vanishes in the happiness of Bob. The Bob memory constant, soaking up through the sediment and richening each level—memory, memory, memory—whenever Mish was fussy or inconsolable or too tired to sleep, Daddy strapping him in the car, punching the cassette, and they ride in the cradle car to Rockabye Bob.
And three weeks ago, on Christmas night, Carlin stretched out on the bottom bunk with his iPod in his ears, his eyes as blank as if he lay in his coffin, Mish standing behind him, Mish straining with marvel, straining with want, all that glorybig music held in a wafer no thicker than ten Pokémon cards. “Wet me wissen,” Mish outright begged, too desperate even to calculate, manipulate. “Wet me wissen,” while Carlin paid him no more mind than he did the fluffs of crud under the bed. “Pweeeese, Caw-win, wet me wissen.” Mish peering now directly into his face, poking him gently on the shoulder. Until Carlin, his eyes still dead, reached out, planted a hand on Mish’s chest, and pushed. Once.
Mish staggered backwards, the tears geysering behind his face. He grabbed the nearest object, a Transformers sticker book, and swung at Carlin. As he did, he yelled, “Me and my daddy wissen to Bob Maw-wee.” And the tears weren’t anymore.
Daddy turns the volume halfway down. “Now, Mish.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t say anything to anybody about us taking this ride, okay?”
“Okay.”
“It’ll just be between you and me.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say anything to Mommy. Or Gran. Even if they ask.”
“Yeah.”
Daddy cranks the music back up, even louder than before. It is the Bob beat that propels Mish’s blood through his veins. Bob is heart. The car tremors, Mish feels the speaker thrumming against his legs, his hips—beat; beat; beat, beat-beat—and he settles back in his seat, the men catching their breaths in his lap, everything’s gonna be, music carrying rhythm carry, the
car a rocker. Lullaby Bob.
The loss of motion wakes him. He flexes his fingers. One man is still there. One he has dropped. Daddy’s unstrapping him—Mish tucks the man in his pocket—lifting him out, and Mish buries his face for a second in Daddy’s jacket against the cold, which has shocked him full awake, immediate and blunt. The cold has blacked the night darker, crisped the stars whiter, but over Daddy’s shoulder, Mish can see clouds like a dirty blanket pulling over distant sky. They are parked just off the hardtop in the mouth of a dirt road leading into a broad field, and Daddy sets him on his feet on the hood of the car. Mish can feel its heat through his tennis shoes. “See the house, Mish?”
Mish looks past the winter grass, bowed and brittle-humped in the three-quarter moon. The house is the only thing rising off the flat of the field until the mountains start again. Mish nods.
“Can you see cars around it?”
Mish nods. Quickshiver is taut on his toes, his hands splayed, head cocked. Mish pulls his coat sleeve against his side, a muted crackle. Daddy is standing on the ground right next to Mish on the hood, one arm around his waist, and Mish thinks of the apples. “Can you start this for me, buddy?” Mish, bearing down with his small front teeth, breaking the peel and gnawing around in the white to give Daddy a good opening.
Daddy takes a finger and stretches the corner of his eye, his lip lifting. “Do you see Tater’s truck?”
Mish squints. “Yeah.” Tater’s truck is easy. A big white Ford extended cab. “Okay, good.” Daddy pulls the corner of his eye again. “Now this is important. This is important, Mish. Look at all of them.”
Mish is looking.
“Do you see a blue Toyota Four-Runner?”
Mish wiggles out of the arm around his waist and lifts onto his toes. A heaviness has come into him. One that makes him bigger and tireder. He knew his cars before he knew his colors, that’s what Daddy always says, and Mish squints again, drawing on the stingy moon, to untangle the snarl of vehicles around the house. He can’t tell blue in the dark, but the shape of a Four-Runner he can.
