“Don’t be so dramatic,” he told her.
When he was away, Mindy’s symptoms showed.
Some things are nothing, but nothing can’t always be forgiven.
OLD BURT
But it hadn’t been a dozen years. There was a boat ride. A deep sea charter.
AA has all these acronyms.
One is HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired.
You don’t want to be those things.
“One is too many,” thought Burt, “a thousand isn’t enough,” he thought, “the alcoholic’s mind is like a bad neighborhood, don’t go there alone,” thought, “this too shall pass.”
Old Burt changed HALT to SHALT in his mind: the S stood for sea sick.
He was sitting there with the salt smell heavy on his breathing, the horizon bobbing up and down, a bucket of minced mullet at his feet, the sloppy sound of the waves on the hull. He knew the trick: stare at the horizon, the stillest spot on the sea, but it wasn’t working. Every so often his vision chanced glances at the clouds that seemed to move in unnatural ways, and he thought he’d be puking soon, and he kept saying the serenity prayer, “God grant me . . .” But then the steward came by:
“Beers, sodas, sandwiches?” the steward asked, and Old Burt ordered three Bud Lights, chugged them like water to mask his symptoms of the churning.
It worked.
That was ten years ago.
It worked.
“To thine own self,” thought Old Burt.
But sometimes truth is the last thing you need.
TYLER
Truth is, Tyler knew why he kept hanging around Old Burt: Tyler felt sorry for him.
Well, Tyler felt sorry for Burt, and he liked the old man too. He wasn’t all bad. Sometimes, when it was just them, Tyler kinda thought Burt treated him like family. Shit, of all the people in the tree house, only Tyler knew.
Once, as they sat on Burt’s porch drinking soda, Tyler asked him, “Why’d you quit?”
“Quit what?”
“Drinking?”
“Ah,” Old Burt had told him, and Old Burt wiped beads of sweat from his glass bottle. He looked Tyler in the eye. “Used to,” he said, “I had a daughter. Michelle,” he said. “That was her name. Died a cancer. About eleven years back.”
“Oh,” said Tyler. “You quit when she died?”
“No, no,” said Burt. “Before.” He chuckled. “It was a promise to God.” Burt looked at his shoes. “When Michelle was diagnosed, I was drinking. She and her mom had moved out the house, you see? I was always showing up messed up. Wrecking cars. Interrupting soccer practice.” Old Burt shook his head. “The two girls were done with me, and they should’a been.”
It was silent. Both Tyler and Burt sipped at their drinks.
“Michelle’s mother called me up, Brandi,” he said, “that’s her name,” he shook his head, “but I gotta say, I don’t like saying it. But she called me up and told me she and Michelle needed to talk, and they had me drive up to Houston where they were living, took me to a Whataburger and told me the sad news over bad coffee, and I asked how I could help.
‘“Burt,’ Brandi told me, ‘You’ve never been much a help at all, but we thought you should know,’ and then Michelle kinda told her mother off for me, told her, ‘you said you wouldn’t do this,’ and then her mother apologized to me, and I said that I understood.
“And, well, on the way home, it just kinda hit me. I pulled off 59 in Victoria and went down to the Riverside Park and wandered the trails there, and I came across a family picking pecans off the ground, speaking Spanish as they tucked the things into plastic bags, and then, later, I saw a herd of deer standing still off in the woods, and a hurt washed over me, but a stillness too. And I was there in the woods and a sun ray dropped down like a Jacob’s Ladder, and it felt like it landed right on me, and I whispered to it, like a kid might whisper into a tin can telephone, that if God kept my daughter safe, I’d never drink again.
“I lived up to my end of the bargain, but I guess God had his fingers crossed, because I watched Michelle go skinny as a skeleton, watched all the treatments just bounce off her, maybe even make her worse, and the day she died I was holding her hand, and she said, ‘don’t start when I’m gone,’ and I told her I wouldn’t, and she said, ‘and get back with Mom,’ and I told her I would, and she smiled at me, and her big blue eyes dropped two tears, one from each, and she laid her head back on a pillow and the tears ran toward her ears.”
Silence sat strong on the porch. No movement.
“Did ya?” asked Tyler.
“What?”
“Stay sober?”
“I did.”
“And the mother.”
Burt smiled. “We were together a while,” he said. “Then one day I went on a fishing trip and she got mad at me. I came back, went to bed, and the next morning, when I woke up, she’d packed her things and was gone,” Old Burt frowned. “She left me an e-mail address, but I’ve never used it. Some things are too fragile to try to put back together.”
ROB
“Scrape’s fucking broken.”
MANNY & TESSA
“You awake?”
“Kinda.”
“Think anyone else is?”
“Probably.”
“I’m too tired to sleep.”
“Me too,” Tessa says, “isn’t that funny? I’ve never been too hungry to eat, but when I’m beat like this, I just fidget and toss.”
“I used to always have to pretend I’d been hurt.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Manny says. “Like wounded or, like, sick.”
Both Manny and Tessa giggle.
“Like, I’ll pretend I’m an old-time soldier, been shot and in a military hospital with all kinds of dying men around me, and the smell of medicine, and people fighting to save their legs from amputation, and that I’m just there and bandaged and listening to the nurse wheel carts around from bed to bed.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Tessa says.
“Maybe,” says Manny. “But sometimes it works.”
Both Manny and Tessa lie there, their minds packed with the noise imagined from military hospitals.
Manny falls asleep.
TESSA
She thinks about nurses, soldiers gut shot and bleeding.
She thinks smells—antiseptic, urine.
The noise of pain, low grunts emitting from the wounded. Whispers to gods and mothers and girlfriends.
One soldier’s hand drapes from the side of his bed. From the tip of his index finger, dark blood drips into a pool on the tile floor. His hand is reflected in the pool, and each time a bead of blood increases the perimeter of the puddle, ripples distort the reflection, the blood shimmies iridescent.
There is a cart. Rusty wheels. A white clad nurse pushes it, and a sort of song emits. Her black shoes against the white tile in time, the sing song whine of rusty wheels spinning. Fluorescents flicker. A lullaby to Tessa.
And then she’s asleep.
TIM
Tim’s phone is near dead, but he lays beneath the covers looking at the nude pictures he’s accumulated.
Some of the girls, he can’t even remember their names. Girls he met at rodeos and girls he knew from high school and some women that he’d known from church and some of his mother’s friends and friends’ mothers and sisters of people he’d worked with.
He liked his picture collection, but it also made him feel sick.
What was wrong with him? Why was he so foul-minded?
In high school he’d had a girlfriend who’d told him he was a “good one.” That’s what she had said. She’d called him kind. She’d called him sweet.
She went away to school. She didn’t call like she said she would.
A few Christmases later, Tim was at Rudy’s, a bar that’s now closed.
She was there. The girl. She had a guy with her, and the two came up to Tim, and the girl introduced Tim to the new guy by saying, “This is my f
riend Tim.”
Friend Tim.
Friend Tim.
Tim scrolls through his pictures.
Chubby girls and black girls and white girls and girls with soft, full breasts, and girls with small tits, nipples the color of almonds.
Tim’s phone says: 10% Battery.
Tim looks at a few more pictures.
Tim turns off his phone.
BLUE
Blue is drunk.
Blue is snoring.
Blue’s too drunk to dream.
Or too drunk to remember.
His dreams in the morning.
MORNING
Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Hear that?” asks Old Burt.
“A branch?” says Blue. “The wind?”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Too constant,” says Mindy.
They all sit up. Panic upon them.
“Someone look out the window,” says Tessa.
“You look,” says Blue.
“Ain’t you just a fucking man,” says Mindy.
“Never claimed to be,” says Blue. “Ain’t we in my fucking tree house?”
“I’ll look,” says Tyler. “Probably nothing,” he says.
“After last night,” says Old Burt, “it’s doubtful.”
Tyler goes to the window, parts the drapes, places his face to the glass.
Hands. Thousands, millions, scurrying on fingers like spiders or crabs. Only hands. Black, coarse hair covering them. Fingernails sharp and long. They move flicker quick over parked cars, across rooftops. They break glass, smash mailboxes, toss broken bits of Scrape to and fro, willy nilly. Pouncing on the pads of their fingers, acrobatically, unfazed, seemingly, by gravity, they cross walls un-slowed, sweeping perpendicular to the ground the way roaches or squirrels may, the tapping sound of their progression like typing or Morse code, the clickety clack of their multitudes like a million tiny locomotives chugging along miniature tracks. A static kind of hiss from their legions, a sort of white noise birthed by their oddity, and Tyler contemplates them, unaware of what to call them, but the others in the tree house sense his fear raging, sense him growing disturbed.
Some stories are so old, they split just like rivers. Headwaters birth channels that spit tributaries in all directions. The fuzzy hand, the Devil’s hand, the black hand, the hand of Horta.
Some say this: it is the Spanish Inquisition and a Muslim man will not convert. Of course, this isn’t exact history. He could have been a Jew, a pagan, a witch. If it is a witch it is a woman. If it is a woman, it may have been a child. Whatever it was, it stood trial for its sins against the church, was found guilty and put to death, dumped in a mass grave, and there, the magic starts. How? It is unclear. For others, it is the New World. Perhaps in modern day America. Missions are erected to convert the natives, but some refuse. Those who do are similarly sentenced to death. They are buried in indigenous graveyards where the local magic does its trick. Later still, it could be a woman who feverishly masturbates to death, the hand so intent on masturbating, that it leaves its owner who can no longer maneuver it. Or, perhaps, there is a merchant so intent on counting his jewels and coins, that his hand carries on the counting even after the merchant has passed away. In all of these myths, the result is the same: An evil hand wanders the world freely. It steals, kills and torments. It maims, interferes, harasses. In some myths, the hand can grow many times the size of a man. It carries evil children away to Satan. It kills adulterers, rapes women, steals gold.
In all of these myths, the thing is pure evil.
“I got a feeling,” says Old Burt, “those things are testier than the children.”
“They are,” says Manny. “At least, says the legend.”
“This another Mexican thing?” asks Tyler.
Manny nods, and Old Burt just stares at him. “I’m so fucking happy you fuckers lost the Alamo,” he says.
Teddy rolls up the sleeping bag and Scarlett holds the pillows. She smiles at him. “You ready?” she asks.
Teddy grabs the bag, takes one last look around. “Yep,” he says. He smiles back at her, “Time to hit the road.” Teddy walks to the front door; Scarlett lingers behind mildly, casting a nostalgic gaze at the place they’ve lived the past year. She remembers the times, the day they moved in. How they’d ordered pizza and drank cheap wine from plastic cups, sitting Indian style on the floor eating, talking about how they’d decorate the place once they’d built the energy to unpack.
The door opens.
Scarlett hears it.
Hears Teddy step into the day.
But then, another sound . . .
“How many rounds y’all got left?” Old Burt asks Manny and Tyler.
The boys fish their pockets, check their clips, look at Burt with worry. “Four bullets,” says Tyler, and Manny says, “Six shells.”
“I got four rounds in my revolver,” he looks out the window. “Eighteen shots total,” he continues, then beneath his breath begins fruitlessly counting the many queer creatures. “We are surely fucked,” he says.
Teddy screams, “Close the door,” and Scarlett turns to the sound of his screaming.
From inside the dark room, outdoors shines devastatingly bright, hideously lit, so the shape of the door seems the sharpest rectangle ever laid eyes on by man. In that rectangle, Scarlett sees, though she can’t quite comprehend it, the black, hairy hands converging on Teddy, fits of them creeping up his legs and torso, and Teddy punching them from him, but there are way too many.
If she were closer, she would see, the evil hands clenched tight to Teddy’s clothes, plucking his balance from him as the weight of the hands slowly but surely drags him down to the cement, where the critters clutch him to the ground and begin to scrape into his flesh, working their way into his muscles, spilling his blood, as Teddy screams his anguish, launches his imperative again at Scarlett, “Close the door, close the door, close the door.” And she flings herself to the knob of the thing, slams it shut, falls to her knees against it hysterically, sobbing a terror-laden woe.
Outside Teddy’s eyes are open toward the bluest sky he’ll ever see, and the fingers of the hands are moving lickety split, mincing his body into bits, flecks and globules—Teddy’s blood draining out across the white cement of the driveway all around them.
Blue Parson’s opens a beer, guzzles it.
“How many of those are left?” Old Burt asks.
Blue lowers his beer from his lips, pants breath, wipes his mouth with the back of a hand. “Thought you didn’t drink,” he says.
“I don’t,” says Old Burt, “but just fucking tell me.”
Blue looks into the ice chest. “Four Millers,” he says, “one Bud.”
“All cans?” Old Burt asks.
Blue nods, “All cans,” he says.
“Burt, what the hell you getting at?” asks Mindy.
Old Burt looks at her. “Well,” he says, “there’s five us guys,” he looks at each of the men, “and, if it comes to it, one of us might need to create a distraction,” he looks out the window at the hands, “I’m not certain they know we’re here, or what their intentions are, but, when they figure it out, and we figure them out, one of us might need to draw ’em off.” He looks at Tessa, looks at Mindy. “I wouldn’t feel right asking one of you ladies to do it,” he smiles, “might mean certain death and all,” he says. He looks out the window again. “We ain’t got no straws,” he says, “I’m proposing we pluck beers for it. Reach in blind, each of us men,” he nods at the others, “whoever gets the Bud, gets the duty.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” says Tim. “There’s six guys. Me, Blue, you, Manny, Tyler and Rob.”
Old Burt laughs. “I would never trust this job to no nigger,” he says, and Tyler is almost certain Old Burt winks at him.
Blue finishes his beer, drops it on the ground and steps on it. “Let’s do it,” he says, “so we can get back to drinking ’em.”
Tyler pulls a Miller.
Blue pulls a Miller.
Old Burt pulls the Bud. He smiles. “Figures,” he says, “beer’s been an eternal enemy.”
Old Burt takes Manny’s shotgun, gives it to Tyler, takes Tyler’s pistol. “Shotgun’s the best weapon to protect against intruders,” he says to Tyler, “and Manny can’t shoot for shit.”
“What are you gonna do?” asks Tessa.
Old Burt looks at her, “I got an arsenal in my house,” he says, “automatic rifles, grenades, a flame thrower.” He nods, “I’m gonna try to get over there, make massacre on these little nigger hands.” Then Old Burt opens his Bud. “Bill W. asked for whiskey on his death bed,” Old Burt says, “he was the founder of AA,” he sips the beer, “nurses refused him, said he was out of his wits with the pain, said he would regret it. I’m not certain how. He died a day or so later. You think God gets mad at you for falling off the wagon right before you die?” Old Burt asks.
Blue opens another beer, “Who gives a shit?” he says, and Old Burt and Blue cheers.
Below the tree house, the hands are growing thicker, festering like a business of flies, climbing each other, knocking each other down.
“They know,” says Old Burt. “It’s time,” he chambers a round in the 9 mm, tucks the gun in his waist band. “The zip line will hold me?”
“Tested at over 300 pounds,” Blue says.
“I’m well under that,” says Old Burt.
“This is crazy,” says Tessa.
“What part of it?” asks Rob.
Old Burt zips out into the air above the black hands. They seem aware of him, follow him down the line.
The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World Page 4
