Crawlers

by John Shirley

  “My name’s Stanner,” the man said, in an unhurried, vaguely friendly sort of way. “Major Stanner. Could I talk to you in private, Mr. Morgenthal?”

  Stanner ambled over to the desk, casually showed Morgenthal some kind of ID—blocking it from the kids with his body.

  Morgenthal’s eyes widened, seeing the ID. Adair wished she could see it.

  “The police gave me a call,” Stanner went on, glancing at his watch. “Wow, it’s getting toward dinnertime. Anyway, we think—” He glanced at the kids. “You guys still here?” Stanner turned to Morgenthal, raised his eyebrows.

  Morgenthal stood up and said, “Sure, I—yeah.” He turned to Waylon and Adair. “You kids, out! Thanks for coming by, Waylon. I’ll let you know about the class; we’ll do some book work next time maybe.”

  Stanner smiled reassuringly at Adair and Waylon. She thought there was a kind of wistfulness. Like he really did wish they didn’t have to leave.

  But Waylon had red spots on his cheeks, and he was chewing his lower lip. He seemed mad about something. You could tell he recognized the guy, too.

  Waylon crossed his arms. “I’m staying. Hey, look, you people ought to come clean about this shit. Serious.”

  “Waylon!” Mr. Morgenthal said sharply. “I won’t have that kind of language in here. Now go outside, please!”

  “It’s no big thing, Waylon,” Stanner responded, using Waylon’s name as if he were one of the school administrators, with that kind of informal authority.

  “You were at the crash site, man. I recognize you,” Waylon said. “And there should have been stuff on the news about it, and there wasn’t, so that means a cover-up, like when the CIA covered up how they smuggled crack into south central L.A.!”

  “I don’t actually have anything to do with crack dealing in Los Angeles, Waylon,” Stanner said, seeming mildly amused.

  “You deny you were at that crash site?”

  “I helped out when I was in the area, yes. Just coincidence. I’m looking into something else. Equipment stolen from some schools, that might be used in domestic terrorism. It’s not really a likelihood, but we follow up all the little things nowadays. So there you are, you dragged it out of me.”

  “You mean I dragged your cover story out of you, dude!”

  Morgenthal groaned. “Waylon, for God’s sake . . .”

  “And I’m not CIA,” Stanner said, chuckling. “I just do a little investigating for the government.”

  “Bullshit, man, the fucking CIA has a hand in everything, and chances are that satellite was theirs! Surveillance shit! The CIA fucking shot Kennedy and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, dude. Don’t tell me they’re not—”

  “Waylon!” Mr. Morgenthal barked, his face bright red. “I warned you, and I’m writing you up for this! Now get out or I’ll have your mother in here!”

  Waylon winced at that. “Yeah, like she’d show up,” he muttered, going to the door, Adair with him. Then he stopped and turned to glare at Stanner, who smiled and waved at him. Waylon looked as if he might charge Stanner to try to shake the truth out of him.

  “Come on, Waylon,” Adair said hurriedly. “He’s not going to tell you anything. What are you going to do, chain yourself to him? Let’s go.”

  After a few tense seconds—Waylon glaring, Stanner smiling patronizingly—Waylon let her steer him out into the hall. But he pulled away from her and stood to one side of the doorway, trying to eavesdrop.

  Stanner emphatically closed the door, nodding at Waylon and Adair in a friendly way as he shut it firmly in their faces. They heard him talking to Morgenthal, but they couldn’t make out a word through the closed door—even with Waylon pressing an ear to it.

  “Fine,” Waylon said, straightening up. “But I remember that motherfucker. I’m going back out to the crash site. There’s some heavy shit going down.”

  “You heard him. He was here about, you know, some other thing completely.”

  “Oh, sure, and he’s here ‘coincidentally’ for two different things? How do we know there’s not a UFO connection in this whole thing? That thing came from space—okay, it was American made, but how do we know the aliens didn’t shoot it down, or didn’t, like, climb into it or something?”

  Trying to sound like she was half joking, she said, “Do you know how nuts you sound?” They walked out into the crisp late afternoon. He was right that Stanner was probably lying. But UFOs didn’t feel right. It was something else.

  Waylon, she saw, totally loved the theater of it all. It kept his mind off other stuff, probably.

  She looked at him as they walked along the avenue. She was almost running to keep up with his long angry strides.

  “You going to the bus stop?” she asked.

  “Till I get a car.”

  She’d been hoping maybe that evening he’d make his move. Not that she’d let him get very far. But she wished he’d make a move anyway. A little making out couldn’t hurt anything. She might even give him a hand job. That much was okay. They ended kind of gross, but she didn’t mind too much. It was just reproductive fluids and DNA.

  But he was staring straight ahead, and she could almost feel what he was thinking. It was practically right there in the air. How to get over to the site?

  “It’ll be dark in an hour or so,” she said. “Let’s go tomorrow morning.”

  “What? No! Tonight! Hey, you think that fucking stoner cousin of yours would give us a ride?”

  She sighed. “I thought you said something about how I should, like, come over to meet your mom?”

  He looked at her in surprise. “I did?”

  “No, you didn’t. I was being sort of sarcastic. But . . . you could ask me to meet her.”

  He stared at her. “Why?”

  She ground her teeth together. “Never mind. Forget it.”

  Mom, this is Adair. She’s sort of special to me.

  Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen. He was weird about people going to his house.

  “So you want to go check out the crash site again or what?” he asked, staring off toward the Suisun Bay.

  She blew out her cheeks. She didn’t want to go to the crash site— but she didn’t want to go home, either. She felt more and more uncomfortable at home, since Lacey had moved to the motel. “I’m starving. If we can go to Burger King, or something first, I’ll call Mason, and we’ll see what he says. If he’s not too stoned out.”

  “Tight,” Waylon said. “We go to Burger King and then the crash site. Um, you got any money?”

  8

  December 3, evening

  Vinnie “Vinegar” Munson was just noticing the feeling in his hands that meant it was getting cold. His fingers felt distant and clumsy. He said, aloud, “Look out, brother, the wind’ll lock handcuffs on your extremities like Officer Rhino.” The lady standing next to him waiting for the light glanced at him, knowing he wasn’t talking to her. That he was just talking. He knew she thought he was “one of those guys.” To all of them, he was “one of those guys,” but to Vinnie Vinegar he was doing exactly what was necessary and right. “It gets routed to New York like lost luggage,” he explained. He wasn’t looking at her, but this time he was talking to her. She didn’t know that, because he was turned away from her and talking in the same voice he’d used before.

  Then the light changed to WALK, which made him feel good. It was all’s-right-with-the-world when he crossed the main street— the only big street—of Quiebra’s Old Town, at exactly the moment when the lit-up hieroglyph of a man began happily striding along in that golden-white electric glow that meant Yes! It always bothered him when it changed to the red glowing hand that said, No! Don’t cross! and he was only three-fourths of the way across.

  He knew perfectly well that the red hand was there to warn people not to start off crossing the street, because they’d be caught in traffic when the light changed. What, was he retarded that he didn’t know that? He was forty-six years old, and he had read the entire Encyclopedia Americ
ana and understood everything but some of the physics parts, and he certainly wasn’t retarded. But the red hand bothered him. Couldn’t they put up some kind of machine that jumped up and stopped people behind him, so that he didn’t have to look at the red hand saying No!

  “The red hand,” he said aloud, “is not meant for you.” He had to tell himself that a few times, till he was past it. He was afraid it would come down and burn his face with a red hand imprint, the way Mom used to slap him, but of course, it never did. His therapist would have said, “You don’t really believe it’s going to do that, you’re just letting some tension go, worrying about it. That’s one of the ways you release tension.”

  But he still worried about it.

  He got past the red hand, then walked past the boarded-over place that used to be some kind of big butcher shop and still had a sign on it, QUIEBRA’S OWN LAZY AGED MEAT. People made jokes about that sign, jokes his mother called “unsuitable.” There was a silly drawing of a lazy cow on the sign. Mother had explained there’d been some idea that aged meat was tastier, but it made him think of roadkill. Once you started thinking about roadkill, it was hard to stop. He hated thinking about roadkill.

  He looked at his watch. It was 5:32. That sequence of numbers irritated him. It implied 5432 but it left out the 4.

  At 6:00 he would watch Starbots. He knew it looked childish, watching a cartoon every day, but this was a Japanese cartoon, and it was so beautiful he didn’t understand how anyone could resist watching it. He didn’t like other cartoons. He didn’t like Sponge-Bob, he didn’t like Scooby-Doo. That stuff was childish. He watched Crossfire—without looking directly at the people in the show, but watching it anyway—and he understood every word. It was always about something that was in the papers. You couldn’t say he was stupid. It was just that in Starbots, everyone was a Hyperdroid, even the bad guys, and if they got killed, they vanished in a shower of sparks. They didn’t lie there rotting, picked at by turkey vultures, like the roadkill on Quiebra Valley Road. The streets in the show were of some shiny synthetic stuff. Nothing was dirty or unsymmetrical on Starbots. Even the bad guys were beautiful; they didn’t have warts or wrinkles or snot.

  When Zaron and Lania transformed into Starbots, they unfolded with perfect symmetry, like flowers. They made little jokes at each other’s expense, but they didn’t call each other rude names. They were always loyal. They never touched each other, except once in a while one would help the other stand up after a magnetic blast had knocked him down. Vinnie didn’t much like touching people, but he could do it if he had to.

  The Starbots Interworld Station was a beautiful place, even with its villains. “How could anyone not want to be there, instead?” he said aloud, as he started across the footbridge over Quiebra Creek. Down below the little wooden bridge, rushes were bending and ducks were coursing in the stream. “Show me a duck and I’ll show you a whole way of loving muddy little bugs,” he said, glancing down. Which was, of course, exactly the case and nothing less.

  Vinnie was thinking about Starbots, and how he needed some vinegar to purify his tongue, and hoping there were still some pickles at home, as he hadn’t had any vinegar for more than an hour, and he was toiling up the path that wound between houses and copses of trees to his and Mom’s house, on the crest of the ridge overlooking Quiebra, when he saw the squirrel’s jaws unlock, and something came spinning from its throat.

  It had seemed like an ordinary squirrel, furry red-gold—not really the color of the red No! hand, not actually. Ordinary red squirrel color. It ran in that darting, stopping, darting hesitating way the squirrels used, up the trunk of a eucalyptus. Then it stopped at the place where the tree bole opened into branches, and it tilted its head to stare into a mess of leaves that might’ve been a bird’s nest.

  That’s when its jaws opened way wider than they should be able to, and the silver darting thing came out of the middle of its throat, and it struck just like a snake at something. He saw that the squirrel wasn’t striking at an egg. It had snapped up a piece of something shiny, maybe the clockworks case of an old wristwatch, without its band. So it must be a crow’s nest, because he knew that crows stole shiny things and put them in their nests. And there was a squirrel with a piece of a watch in its mouth. Then the watch spun around in its mouth so fast it blurred, for a full ten seconds it spun there—and then vanished inside the squirrel. The squirrel’s mouth snapped shut with a spurt of blue sparks.

  Then the squirrel seemed to notice Vinnie; to turn a minatory black eye toward him. The eye extended out from its head an inch or two on a little silvery stalk and tilted this way and that. Then the squirrel thing rolled up into a ball, just like a pill bug, and rolled down the trunk, without falling, just like it could stick to the wood, and it rolled off across the sloping ground between the boles of some trees, rustling the dry leaves as it went.

  He stared after it. His mouth was open, and he snapped his own mouth shut, afraid that sparks would come out from between his own lips. But they didn’t.

  He heard a fluttering sound and looked up to see a blue jay glaring down at him. It was completely silent. It just stared and stared. Without a sound. Which wasn’t normal for blue jays. They were never silent for long. They used up a great deal of energy screeching. He had tried to explain the inefficiency of this to them. This silent blue jay cocked its head—and then he noticed that it hadn’t any legs. It had little metal hooks instead of legs. Its head slowly rotated on its neck all the way around, unscrewing, till a little silvery worm was able to come out from the opening in its neck. The worm in the blue jay pointed its metal tip at him—and the tip quivered really fast like one of those New Year’s Eve paper toys that uncurl and shake themselves at you and make a rude noise.

  Then the blue jay rolled itself up like a pill bug, tucking its head between its fish-hook legs, rolled down the tree—and rolled away. It didn’t fly. It rolled.

  Home for Vinnie was uphill from here—but he ran home.

  When he got home he put on the Beach Boys song “In My Room” like he always did, and he got out his journal. He wrote about the squirrel and the blue jay in his backwards book, still breathing hard as he wrote, but he didn’t tell anybody about it, not even Mom.

  He didn’t want them to think he was the kind of person who saw things like that. It was hard enough to get people to be fair.

  December 3, night

  Cal was sitting with his mom and dad watching TV and wondering why it felt so fucked up. It was what Adair used to call Family TV Night. It was pretty much the last thing they did willingly and happily together. And it usually felt okay. Adair wasn’t here, so tonight it wasn’t the whole family, but that wasn’t the problem.

  He thought about Adair insisting something was wrong with Mom and Dad. He’d yelled at her for saying it; maybe he’d yelled at her because it was bothering him, too.

  There was something with Mom. Was she pissed off at Dad? She wasn’t laughing at the show, and she kept looking at Dad. She would glance at him, then at the TV, then she’d look at him again. He watched the TV and laughed, right along with the laugh track. He turned and smiled at them warmly from time to time. At least, the smile seemed warm.

  So what was bothering her?

  Cal wasn’t sure. Yet he almost knew.

  For once, it occurred to him to just right out ask her. But you couldn’t ask your parents stuff like that—Why are you acting so weirdly, Mom? At least, not in his family.

  A commercial came on; during the commercials he whipped out his Palm Pilot—the expensive one he’d gotten so cheap on eBay— and checked his E-mail. Tapped out a reply to his friend Kabir in Palm Pilot graffiti: Can’t go to mall tonight . . . family shit . . .

  The show came back on, with dull inevitability, and he folded up the Palm Pilot. He wished Lacey was here, but she’d moved to a motel.

  It was hard to think of her as Aunt Lacey. She seemed more like an older sister. She was pretty cool. She seemed to be ready to deal with wh
atever came along no matter how screwed up it was. She never got annoyed. Sometimes Lacey seemed puzzled by Mom but never pissed off.

  The sitcom wended its predictable way. “What a loser show,” Cal muttered.

  “Would you like to change the channel, son?” Dad asked, and he didn’t seem sarcastic about it. He changed to another channel. A talk show with a bunch of women talking about breast implants. “How’s this one, son?” he asked.

  Son? “Uh . . .” His dad knew better than to think he’d watch something like that.

  So he changed to a WWE show. Wrestlers heaved themselves around the ring. “How about this one?”

  “Oh, I don’t—”

  He kept flicking through them, too fast to judge, until finally Cal stood up, almost convulsively, and said, “Actually, I’m gonna take a walk.”

  He started for the front hall, hesitated in the archway. Felt like he should say something more, but he wasn’t sure what.

  Then his dad said, “Sure thing, son,” and turned the TV off. “Certainly,” he added. He got up and went out into the garage. Began rustling around out there. Mom just sat in the chair, gazing toward the TV.

  Then she looked toward the garage. Then back at the blank TV. Then at the garage. Then back at the TV. It was freaking Cal out.

  He turned to go, and she said suddenly, “Cal?”

  Her voice sounded almost strangled. As he turned back to her, he wondered if she had something caught in her throat.

  “What?”

  “Cal.” She was looking at him, then at the garage. Then at him. Then at the garage again. Then she lifted up her left hand, and she stared at it. And the hand twitched.

  He got a twisty feeling and asked, “You okay, Mom? Should I get Dad?”

  “Dad? No! No.” She stood up awkwardly, took a step toward him, twisted her head about on her neck as if trying to clear a crick, opened her mouth, and said . . .