by Kevin Wilson
Dedication
for Tony Earley and Colonel Padgett Powell
Epigraph
He’s a child! It is hopeless! Hopeless! Hopeless!
—Carson McCullers, A Member of the Wedding
“We are the parents,” Milton said. “We have to watch.”
—Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Scroll Through the Weapons
Housewarming
Wildfire Johnny
A Visit
A Signal to the Faithful
Sanders for a Night
No Joke, This Is Going to Be Painful
Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine
The Horror We Made
The Lost Baby
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Also by Kevin Wilson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Scroll Through the Weapons
It was almost midnight when my girlfriend got a call from her sister, who had been arrested for taking a kebab skewer at a cookout and stabbing her husband.
Even though it was over an hour away, I drove my girlfriend to their house so she could watch her nieces and nephews until their parents found a way to get back home. “If they end up killing each other,” my girlfriend told me, “I think I’m the one who gets custody of the kids.” I didn’t have to say anything in response because she knew as well as I did that I would not be around if that scenario ever became a reality.
The kids were as close to feral as you can get, like animals dressed up in camouflage jumpsuits. Someone had dumped an entire box of frozen corn dogs onto a pan and was warming them on top of a kerosene heater in the living room. The younger boy, who was five, was dancing around his brother, eight, and sister, ten, who were tearing open packets of Pop-Tarts even though there were already dozens of half-eaten Pop-Tarts all over the house. There were three or four kittens, their eyes oozing pus, running up and down the hallways, and my eyes burned from the smell of piss that saturated the air. In what was ostensibly the dining room, there were, I shit you not, six broken, outdated computers in plain sight.
The older girl, who I think was fourteen but looked older, lanky and petulant and tough, was playing a video game about the apocalypse, but all she kept doing was scrolling through the available weapons in her possession while the game was on pause. I couldn’t stand still in the house because the toxins in the air would settle on me, so I kept pacing through the rooms, afraid to stop moving. In the kitchen, there was a person-sized puddle of grape soda that had turned solid, imprints of the kids’ bare feet tracking it all over the vinyl floor.
My girlfriend took the middle siblings, who shared a room, into the bathroom and turned the shower on them and got them ready for bed. Then she made a bed on the sofa for the little boy and we watched him hump a pillow for nearly fifteen minutes before he finally fell into something that was barely sleep. The oldest kid just kept scrolling through all the weapons she could, if she wanted to, use on any number of irradiated mutants. My girlfriend went into the kitchen to clean up a little, and I watched the hypnotic clicking of the game as the girl went back and forth between items: brass knuckles, pieces of brick, a baseball bat with nails in it, a BB gun, a 9 mm pistol, a sniper rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, an arc welder, a Molotov cocktail, a Bowie knife, a sledgehammer, an empty two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, a plasma rifle, and on and on and on. She had buzzed black hair and a lip ring, a complicated bird drawn on her left hand with permanent marker. She was wearing a ratty sports bra and sweatpants that seemed made for a giant.
Finally, without even looking at me, she said, “People always talk, but then, when you do something, they shut up.”
I had no idea if she was threatening me or if this was connected to the paused game, but I did not, for one second, think about responding.
“Bitches are everywhere,” she said without any emotion whatsoever.
“Okay,” I said.
She finally unpaused the game, having selected a plasma rifle, and it was not more than five seconds before a zombie jumped from a tree overhead and ripped out her throat. She restarted the game, paused it, and scrolled again through the list of available weapons. The cat-piss smell was starting to settle on my clothes, particles of it like snowflakes on my eyelashes, and so I got up and did another round through the house.
I found a bone beside the toilet,” my girlfriend said to me, holding up something white and hard; it was not a fragment of a bone, but an intact bone of unknown provenance. Human or animal, we did not know, and both seemed equally likely based on the other evidence in the house. We had to keep our voices down because the older girl was still in the living room, gnawing on the wooden corn-dog sticks until they splintered in her mouth, still trying to decide how best to kill something imaginary.
“He split her lip once,” she said to me, like there wasn’t a bone on the edge of the sink in front of us, like we were just going to table the unknown bone and talk about what we already knew, that her sister and brother-in-law were not going to resolve anything anytime soon.
“Do you think the skewer is a direct, like, retaliation for getting her lip split?”
“I don’t know,” she said, seriously considering it. “It was, like, almost a year ago.”
“You think your sister could take a split lip, hold on to that moment for almost a year, waiting for the right time and weapon, and stab him?”
“Yes,” she replied, her eyes like a kaleidoscope with the realization of how right she was.
“Then it’s just going to escalate, I think,” I told her, as if this was the kind of shit I had any experience with.
“What do I do?” she asked me, and I was shocked to see her crying. She was crying about her fucked-up, always drunk, sarcastic sister. She was scared because her sister was in jail and she was probably going to have to pay the bail and her sister would probably be released from jail at the same time her brother-in-law would be released from the hospital and they would probably just walk right back into this shitty house and fuck everything up again. My girlfriend was crying because her sister, who hated her, would need help, and my girlfriend would try to figure out how to give it.
I leaned across the sink to pull her close to me, and I knocked the bone into the sink and it made a clattering sound that made my teeth grind. But I held on to her and tried to calm her until I heard the little boy, moaning and half awake and needing some kind of assistance. She started to get up, but I set her on the edge of the bathtub, right next to a giant hole in the ceramic like someone dropped a bowling ball on it, and told her I would take care of it.
Before I had even completely knelt down to look at the boy, he had his arms around my neck. “Are you having a bad dream, buddy?” I asked, and he whimpered and nodded. “It’s okay,” I said, and I am not lying when I say that I was suppressing my gag reflex the entire time I was holding him, this sweet little boy who was in no way responsible for all the awful shit that swirled around him on a daily basis. I thought back to what my girlfriend had said about custody if the parents killed each other and I thought, Fuck it, maybe I’ll take this one and light out for parts unknown. I’d never held a baby, a toddler, or any child really, but I was getting used to being needed by something powerless. The boy had snot running down his nose and I didn’t even think about it when I took the sleeve of my shirt and cleaned up his face. I lowered him back onto the sofa and he, like he was a black belt in jujitsu, snatched my hand and pulled my entire left arm underneath his body, right up against his crotch, and he humped my arm for what felt
like a long time until the battery inside of him wore out and he was asleep again. I looked over at the teenage girl, still scrolling, still obsessed with finding some kind of A-bomb of a weapon that automatically ended the game in her favor, and she was smirking, shaking her head like I’d just been punk’d, like she’d set this all in motion and now I had done something embarrassing for her.
“You ever kill a fucking thing in this game?” I asked her, my face hot with embarrassment.
“More than you ever could,” she said.
My hand was tingling, like it had some kind of special power that the little kid had imparted in the course of his humping.
“In real life,” I said, “I don’t think you can just pause the action until you find the right weapon.”
“That’s why I’m practicing with this game,” she said. “When I go into the Marines, I’ll be ready.”
“You’re going to be a marine,” I said, my voice lacking the slightest bit of surprise or suspicion.
“I’m gonna be a sniper,” she replied, “or a light machine gunner, or on the back of a fifty cal, and I’m gonna be the best.” I noticed that she’d duct-taped a butterfly knife to one of her boots.
“Fair enough,” I said.
I went back into the bathroom to find my girlfriend now on her knees, scrubbing the tub with scouring agents that had not been utilized once in the house’s history. I told her that it was too late to even think about cleaning this place. She replied that she was going to sleep in the bathtub, its surface offering the quickest possibility of cleanliness. “The sheets,” she said, shuddering, “require more than I can handle right now.” I asked her what about me. I could not fit in the tub with her. She suggested that, it being summer, I could sleep on the front porch. Now that the tub had been scraped clean and disinfected, she settled into it and twisted her body into the shape of sleep. I leaned over and kissed her. “We’ll figure this out,” I told her, and I hoped that she noticed that I had said we. I wanted her to know that, despite her questionable genetics, whatever hidden DNA contributed to the inhabitants of this house, I was a part of this now. I wanted her to know that, if we ever combined our genes, the good would outweigh the bad. But she was already snoring, so who knows if my intentions were understood.
Back in the living room, the oldest kid was asleep, her gums bleeding from the corn-dog sticks, her hand in some state of rigor mortis, her thumb depressing the controller so that, all night long, she would be scrolling through her weapons. I walked out of the house, across the lawn, and slept in my car, the windows rolled up, already reeking of my new circumstances.
I woke the next morning to find the two middle kids sitting in the passenger-side front seat. One of them had twisted off the stereo knobs and the other one was trying, and failing, to get the car’s electric cigarette lighter to ignite. The girl, her teeth a crooked mess that, at her age, seemed sweet enough, said, “Are you going to marry Sassy?” I asked her if my girlfriend was Sassy. They said yes, and I said yes in reply without hesitation. They asked what they could call me. “Just call me Cam for now,” I told them. “We’re hungry, Cam,” the boy said. I looked around the car but I kept it clean so there wasn’t any food around. I said we should go inside and find something, but they said they were out of food and that Sassy wanted me to drive them to the Creekside Market and get some food. They were in their underwear, or maybe it was their pajamas. “Fine,” I said, and I sped off without telling them to put on seat belts. They shared the front seat and leaned out of the window. If a car crash could have maimed them, I would have been shocked into a coma.
At the market, I handcuffed my hands around their wrists and led them up and down the tight aisles of the market. The air in that building was humid and smelled of crickets and worms from the bait boxes near the register. We got some cans of Vienna sausages and some more Pop-Tarts and gallon jugs of fruit punch. I did not trust the eggs or milk in this place, where the refrigerated section was humming smoke and rot. The girl asked for some boxes of macaroni and cheese and so we got four of them. The boy asked for some kind of powder candy that turned their mouths shocking shades of blue. Fine with me. I bought whatever they asked for. The total was more than I had expected, but that’s what life is like with four kids, I supposed. It seemed like anything more than two kids was resigning yourself to a life of food in bulk and lack of funds. I figured, now that I was so sure I was going to marry my girlfriend, when the previous night I imagined the ease of leaving her, that if we did come into custody of the kids, we could choose two of them to keep and send the other two into foster care. I knew this was wrong, but I also knew the rest of my time with these kids was going to be a silent audition for my grace. We bagged up the goods and sped home, their mouths toxic with the candy they had not saved for their siblings.
Back at the house, I found the oldest girl removed from the couch for the first time in our short history together. She was standing in the utility room and holding a garbage bag while my girlfriend, her nostrils plugged with tissue paper, shoved her gloved hand into the dryer. “What’s going on?” I asked. The girl just shrugged and, when she saw her brother and sister skipping into the kitchen with the food, dropped the garbage bag and shuffled, her body getting closer to the kitchen without any apparent ambulation, toward them. My girlfriend gagged and turned quickly away from the dryer. “Where the fuck did she go?” she said. I motioned toward the kitchen without moving my gaze from the dryer. “What’s going on?” I asked again.
“All of their clothes smell like . . . like this house,” she said. “So I told them we needed to wash their clothes, and they said the washing machine was broken. And it is, I think, or maybe a fuse is blown. But when I looked in the dryer, which does work by the way, there was . . . this thing in it.”
I picked up the garbage bag and held it out for her. She gathered her courage, took a sharp intake of breath, and then retrieved a dead squirrel from the mouth of the dryer with her thumb and index finger. Half of the squirrel was fur and half of the squirrel was bone. It was flattened. She weakly tossed it toward me, toward the garbage bag I realized too late, and it fell to the floor, right at my feet. We both danced out of the room, into the hallway, and stared at the corpse.
“Do you think it died in there?” she asked.
“Or what?” I asked.
“Or do you think someone put it in there?” she said.
One of the kittens started to paw at the squirrel. Its claws got caught in the fur and it shook its paw to disengage itself. My girlfriend picked up the squirrel and dropped it like a grenade into the bag. I twirled the bag shut and took it into the backyard. The less said about the backyard, the better. Rusted tractor. Burned-up motorcycle parts. Elaborate pet cemetery.
“Okay,” my girlfriend said to the kids, who were eating, of course, every last one of the Pop-Tarts. “I want each one of you to pick three outfits: shirts, pants, socks, underwear, plus one pair of pajamas, and your bedsheets. We’re going to the Laundromat.”
The little boy cheered, the frosting and fruit filling between his teeth like something caught in a bear trap.
I played Old Maid with the kids while my girlfriend got the washing machines whirring into the early stages of shocking all the death out of those tainted fabrics. She had a plastic bag filled with quarters from the change machine and they were rapidly declining. I shuffled the cards and discovered the pattern of play; they cheated. Without hesitation or attempt to hide it. I dealt the cards. The child who received the Old Maid card would quickly pretend that it was one of a pair and place it, facedown, on the table. After about fifteen minutes of the game, with only one card, a two of clubs or a jack of hearts, left, we would realize that someone had lied. I then had to flip everyone’s cards over until the cheater was discovered. Only then did someone lose and someone else win. At first, I was pissed off. I would explain how receiving the Old Maid card would not mean that you ended up with it at the end. But the kids did not want to take this chance.
They wanted to cheat their way to freedom as quickly as possible. After a few hands, I simply gave up. I took cards and then let someone else take them from me. I let the kids sort it out on their own and the game became nothing more than an incredibly inefficient way to shuffle cards. “Are you guys having fun?” I asked them. The little boy cheered, excited to be doing anything. The other kids didn’t answer, trying to figure out who had already lost and who would lose again.
I emptied a snack machine and let the kids fight over the contents. I sat with my girlfriend while she watched the dryers flash-fry the clothes. “I don’t know if I can walk back into that house,” she said. I asked her why we needed to go back at all.
“Let’s just take them back to our place,” I said.
“It’s an hour away, for starters,” she replied. “And it’s a one-bedroom apartment.”
“It doesn’t smell like cat piss and dead squirrels, though,” I offered.
“I just . . .” she said. “I don’t want them to do to our place what they did to that house.”
“They can’t possibly. Not in a day or two,” I said.
“I think they can,” she said, staring at the kids, who had sugared themselves into what looked zombie enough to be called resting. Their internal batteries, leaking fluid and electrons, were simply recharging themselves for another backbreaking surge.
“What do we do, then?” I said. “We can’t clean that whole house. It’s not possible. It needs government assistance.”
“We do the best we can,” she finally said. “We do just enough to keep them alive.”
“If we could get rid of the cats,” I offered.
“That would help,” she agreed.
We got the kids to fold their own clothes, which had the same effect as if we’d asked them to turn their clothes into origami tumbleweeds. It was hypnotic, to watch their folding, somehow, become unfolding. But my girlfriend walked them through the steps, as if she was in a training video for the Gap, and the kids got it mostly right and we placed them all in some garbage bags and I felt like Santa Claus, carrying a sack of things that, though maybe not what they’d explicitly asked for, would make their lives happier than it was before.
