Mitch Cullin

by Tideland (epub)

  "I will,” I said. "Except I better eat Dell’s cake first, better drink all my apple juice.”

  "And hide the leftovers."

  "I know that already.”

  But there wasn’t going to be any leftovers. I ate every piece of meat, chugged the apple juice, consumed the pound cake in three bites. Then I fetched Grandmother’s cosmetic bag -- my tummy feeling bloated and satiated, my meal swishing around inside, as I sprinted up and back down the stairs.

  "Sit still or else you’ll make me do it wrong,” I told Dickens, who fidgeted while I unzipped the bag. He was cross-legged on the living room floor, spine straight, hands squeezing his knees.

  "Won’t move a muscle," he said. "Don’t have muscles anyway, so I won’t move them.”

  I shushed him, and then emptied the cosmetic bag between us, shaking out the lipsticks and mascara and compacts and tweezers and cotton balls. I arranged the six lipsticks into a row.

  "Now, which one?"

  Scarlet Surrender or Pink Tango or Hyacinth or Sweet Vermilion or Chinese Red or Rose Blush.

  "That one,” he said, pointing at Pink Tango.

  "This is best," I said, taking Scarlet Surrender. "Puff your lips."

  He puckered.

  "Get ready-"

  It was difficult applying the scarlet evenly. Stay in the lines, I told myself -- but my hand moved too fast when doing his bottom lip, and I smeared lipstick across his chin. His upper lip went smoother; I only overshot once, reddening the end of his nose. But that was his fault. He sniffled and my hand jerked.

  "You’re Rudolph," I said.

  ‘'You are,” he replied.

  Then I dabbed on the rouge, brightening his cheeks, creating rosy circles.

  "Almost finished," I said, shutting the compact.

  He was gazing at me, his eyes magnified behind the goggles.

  Bug eyes, I thought. Creepy bug eyes.

  "I think you’re nice,” he said.

  And as I leaned forward, straightening the wig, he kissed my lips -- a nervous peck, which tickled and made me giggle.

  "That’s silly," I said, wiping my lips. "You got red on me, silly kisser.”

  'He glanced at his swimming trunks, embarrassed, and folded his hands over his crotch.

  "The old lady was a silly kisser too," he said. "She kissed me, but that’s when I was little and she was really old. Sometimes she did this in my mouth-”

  He stuck out his tongue and wiggled it.

  "--and that was fun. It was a snake, I think, or a goldfish dancing. She was awfully sweet too. Sometimes I’d be here all day just kissing with her. She’s a nice lady, except she’s dead.”

  I was both delighted and curious to hear him speak of Grandmother.

  "She’s Daddy’s mom," I said. "She never kissed me because I didn’t get born yet.” `

  "I think I knew that. I think maybe someone told that to me.”

  "Dickens, she was your girlfriend -- you were her boyfriend."

  He took his hands from his crotch and assumed an expression of sorrow.

  "No, I was her cutie. Her little cutie. Never been a boyfriend. Don’t know what that is, except if I got older I’d be her boyfriend, I suppose. If she didn’t die, you know. If she didn’t fall down the steps. Think she was coming to kiss me when she falled ‘cause I was there in the yard pulling weeds. And I ran away when she did that. But I didn’t know what to do. I was just little, you know. I was scared, I guess. She was nice."

  "She was old,” I told him, envisioning the chest in the attic, the junk stored within. "How old are you?”

  A worried, confused look settled on Dickens’ face.

  "I don’t know. I’m not an old man though. Dell says I’m a boy. She says l’m a baby. She says I’ll always be a baby ‘cause my brain got wired wrong.”

  You’ll buy a new brain, I thought. When you have the world’s biggest penny, you’ll get the operation.

  "You’re a little cutie,” I said.

  He smiled.

  "You’re a little cutie too.”

  So I kissed him.

  Then he kissed me.

  And we were laughing, our lips and teeth red with scarlet.

  "Silly kissers.”

  I was about to kiss him again when the quarry suddenly boomed, rattling the windows.

  "Uh-oh.”

  Dickens creased his brow. He stared at the ceiling for a moment, the blond coils slipping from his shoulders.

  "They’re expleding the gr0und,” he said. "They dynamite everything so there’s no more left. I seen them do it. I go there and see them. It’s bigger than firecrackers and bullets.”

  "I like firecrackers.”

  "l/Ie too. I really do. So if you want to see the boom hole, you’ll see the ocean to, if you want."

  I nodded.

  "I’ll show you, okay?"

  He reached for my hand.

  "Okay," I said.

  Then we kissed.

  19

  The captain was my boyfriend, my cutie. And I was his l/Irs. Captain, his special one. When he kissed me, my stomach did somersaults. When I kissed him, I wanted to stand on my head and sing. I wanted to spin in circles. Even while we gathered our expeditionary crew -- a Barbie arm as his first lieutenant, Cut ’N Style as my second Mrs. Captain -- I couldn’t stop thinking about those scarlet lips, so strange and exciting, making my belly tingle. Did he feel the same? Were my lips tingling someplace within him?

  "Onward,” he said, assuming his brave captain’s voice. "That ocean boom hole is at least four hundred miles from here."

  Four hundred miles in less than an hour. More like two miles, if that. But how far it seemed, how inhospitable. A desert of bulldozer tracks and chalky silt. No brush. No grass or bluebonnets, just dirt and sand.

  Soon my dress was dusty. I tasted grit. And Dickens’ wig had gone white. Limestone flour powdered the scarlet on his lips, the rouge on his cheeks. He wiped dust from the goggles.

  "If the wind blows bad and we don’t hold hands," he said, "then we’ll be lost and go blind and then we’ll fall in the hole alone or worse. So watch for the wind, okay? It’s a tornado sometimes or a dust devil. So we better be careful. You drop in this hole and you’re a goner for sure. You can’t fly, I don’t think. I can’t. I tried but I can’t. And I can’t swim either."

  We’d journeyed to the end of the world -- having traveled through Johnsongrass and tall weeds and across dirt roads and under barbwire, ignoring DANGER and NO TRESPASSING signs -- going where the cream-colored earth sheered and staggered downward; mammoth ledges hewed from the quarried terrain, large enough for a giant to ascend.

  And there we lay, at the edge of a high rock cliff, gazing over the rim and into the quarry -- or into the boom hole, as Dickens labeled it -- pondering the murky water that spread out below us.

  "If you fell you’d clrop a hundred years until you splashed in the ocean.”

  "How far is that?"

  "Almost a thousand miles, I think.”

  The Hundred Year Ocean lined the very depths of this cliffbound gorge, still and dark beneath the surface.

  "But it’s a lake,” I said. "The ocean goes forever."

  "No,” Dickens replied, "no, no. ‘Cause it’s deeper than any lake, so don’t pretend you know, all right?”

  Then he explained that old cars and old trucks and all kinds of junk lurked somewhere underneath the water. And freshwater jellyfish, about the size of a penny and transparent. Years ago, he told me, three scuba divers drowned before they could find their way back to the surface.

  "‘Cause it don’t have a bottom,” he said. "Never did. These people go in sometimes and can’t get out. That’s why I got a submarine. That way I don’t drown at all.”

  How often had he explored the bottomless ocean in Lisa? A zillion million times, maybe. And what did he find? A battered bicycle, some tires, beer cans -- pennies? Hidden treasure?

  "Just outta space, blue and red stars too. But you can’t breath in s
pace and Lisa is only a submarine, you know. She can’t be a rocketship and a submarine. But if you sink deep deep deep then you’ll reach the moon and much deeper is Mars and deeper than that is God and the baby Jesus, I think.”

  "But what about the booms? You’re lucky Lisa didn’t get exploded!"

  "They don”t boom this anymore,” he said.

  Then using the Barbie arm as an indicator, Dickens pointed across the quarry toward its farthest cliff -- where a solitary cluster of mesquites stretched alongside the brink.

  "Past them trees, these men do it there now. They dynamite that new boom hole but it doesn’t even have an ocean or any jellyfish."

  No sooner had he spoken when a boom erupted, reverberating like a sonorous thunderclap, quaking our perch, jiggling my insides. Dickens shielded his face in the nook of an arm -- and I covered my ears, gaping at the far-off mesquites, expecting fiery billows and chunks of debris to be blazing upward beyond the cluster. Instead -- as if the mesquites had suddenly splintered apart -- I saw a swarm of black birds shoot from the trees, rising into the sky, shrieking; they sailed around like an angry cloud, sweeping in unison, this way and that, eventually returning to their roosts when the boom had died.

  I took my hands from my ears, slowly, listening as the birds squalled.

  "They’re mad,” I told Dickens, who was lifting his head.

  "They were sleeping, I guess. The booms will kill them if they don’t leave soon.”

  And I remembered my father’s story, how as a boy he murdered starlings. So did his cousins. So did Grandmother. Everyone in their town murdered starlings.

  "Because they shit on everything,” my father said, "and they made so much noise. And it was fun as well, I suppose. We got a dime for each bird we caught and killed. Earned nearly five dollars once, and that bought a feast of gum and hardtack back in those days."

  The Annual Clatter Pot Round Up it was called.

  Men and women and children -- fanning out, walking from one end of town to the other -- banging spoons against pots and pans and trashcan lids, frightening the starlings. That racket kept the birds in flight, kept them swooping frantically overhead, searching for a quiet place to land, flying until they couldn’t fly anymore -- then, exhausted, they began plunging. Starlings came tumbling toward the earth, crashing into streets and sidewalks, in yards and on rooftops. And rny father and his cousins and Grandmother and everyone else would start using their spoons like hammers.

  "The ones that were breathing and trying to fly again,” my father said, "we beat the heads flat. Sometimes we just crushed them with our boots, and sometimes the wings were flapping long after the skulls popped."

  My mother hated that story. I did too.

  "Dickens, my daddy murdered birds. It’s mean doing that.”

  But he wasn’t paying attention.

  "That was close,” he said.

  Then he studied the Barbie arm for a while, pressing a thumb into the plastic flesh.

  "I got a secret,” he finally said.

  "What is it?"

  "If I say you can’t tell, okay? If Dell knows she’ll wallop me good and then I’m in trouble forever.”

  "I got a secret too.”

  He looked at me.

  "Give me your secret and I’ll give you mine, okay?”

  "Okay.”

  We both sat up on the cliff, crossing our legs like Indian chiefs. Then I shut Cut ’N Style in a fist so she couldn’t hear. And I whispered my secret, saying that he was my boyfriend, that I was Mrs. Captain -- and that I liked silly kissing his lips.

  "Oh,” he said, "mine is different -- mine is that I got dynamite in my room and that’s bad news for me.”

  Dynamite. Two sticks. He found them at the new boom hole, he said.

  "I forget everything," he said, "and stealing is what gets me in trouble. That’s what happens, that’s why it’s a secret.”

  "I’d like to see,” I said.

  He sighed, drawing his mouth into a tight circle.

  "I don’t know, maybe tomorrow when Dell drives to town. I don’t know. When she drives to town I’m in charge, so I can take care of myself if I want.”

  "If you show me I’ll believe you," I said. "If you show me, you can keep the arm as my birthday present.”

  He was supposed to smile, but his face revealed nothing. He glanced at the arm.

  "WIhat’s its name?"

  "Army," I said.

  "Is it a boy or a girl? A girl is nice, I think."

  "It’s a boy.”

  "How can you tell?”

  I took the arm and held it between my legs, aiming the diminutive appendage outward as if it were a boy thingy.

  "That doesn’t mean it’s a boy," he said.

  "Yes it does. It’s a thingy. You got a thingy, I know."

  "No.”

  "I can see it after we peck. I can see it bigger."

  "No you can’t. That’s wrong. I don’t have that.”

  He rocked forward, folding his forearms over the front of his trunks. A soft breeze pushed around us, stirring the dust in the wig, powdering us with rock flour.

  I set the arm on his left knee.

  "Dickens, I’d like to see your dynamite.”

  "Maybe tomorrow,” he said, "when Dell goes to town. I don’t know.”

  "But you’re my boyfriend," I said.

  "I don’t understand that,” he replied, removing the wig, dumping it in my lap. "I better get home, I think."

  I love you, I thought. You are my dear sweet captain.

  And on the cliff high above the Hundred Year Ocean we kissed for a moment in the late afternoon, then we wandered away, silently, listening as we went, hoping for another boom that never came.

  20

  Cut ’N Style wouldn’t shut up.

  "Dickens has a girlfriend,” she teased. "He’s your boyfriend."

  "He’s my husband,” I told her. "I’m his wife."

  "He’s a dreamboat. He’s a sunny cloud.”

  It was morning, hours before noon. And even though Dickens always brought my meal after lunchtime, I waited on the porch steps for his arrival.

  "Kiss me,” Cut ’N Style said.

  "That’s gross. You’re a girl."

  "Please. Kiss me and I’ll be a boy."

  "Girls don’t kiss girls that way.”

  "Please-"

  I kissed her, but it wasn”t the same as kissing Dickens; there wasn’t any tingling in my belly. Then I consumed her with my mouth, sucking her from my finger, pretending that she was a trout and I was a whale. Her skin tasted like soap, her hair like licorice. She made me gag. So I spit her into my palm.

  "You’re disgusting,” I said.

  And she was supposed to cry or complain. Instead she started laughing.

  "That was fun,” she said. "That was great."

  You’re nuts, I thought. You're crazier than the wind.

  Then we were both laughing.

  "You’re my best friend,” I told her.

  "And you’re mine too.”

  "And I love Dickens.”

  "He’s the sweet prince. He’s the great king.”

  "He’s apple juice and jerky.”

  "We’re a happy family."

  "That’s what we are.”

  And Dell would take care of us all. Soon she’d watch our babies while we explored the Hundred Year Ocean. She’d marry my father and become my mother. Then she and Dickens and Cut ’N Style and I would build a castle from mesquite branches and flattened pennies. We’d eat meat and pound cake at every meal. We’d drink juice from gold-plated Dixie cups.

  "It’s a dream come true,” I said.

  "It’s Christmas,” Cut ’N Style said.

  My belly tingled. I poked my stomach, imagining a baby squirming within, a Barbie baby with real rooted eyelashes and blue goggles and a real brain. I saw it on TV -- if a boyfriend silly kissed a girlfriend enough times, something was bound to happen.

  "Tell Dickens,” Cut ’N Style was
saying. "Tell him about the castle and the babies. And then you’ll see his dynamite. Maybe Dell is driving to town already and he’s there alone thinking he’d like you to visit and see his dynamite."