“Too easy,” Faisal said, picking up a stick and whipping it into a field. “Same for the rest of them. No simple answers.”
“Mine, for example, is not actually lightbulb manipulation. It’s spiders,” she said with a slight nod.
“Spiders,” Michael said. “Which is why she wears the pants in this relationship.”
“How do spiders work as a superpower?” I asked.
Faisal grinned and Matty pointed at him. She said, “He’s smiling because he’s responsible for this and he knows it.”
An advantage to having a low alcohol tolerance is that it didn’t take much beer for me to start thinking that we were all best friends and that the night should go on forever.
That this is what normal felt like.
“I’m like the guy that shot Batman’s parents.” He didn’t look like this was regrettable.
“He showed me Arachnophobia when I was a little kid and now I’m terrified of spiders.”
“It’s a classic movie,” Faisal said.
“Yeah, except for the lifelong terror it induces.”
“One might argue, that’s why it’s a classic.”
“But so there’s this scene, right, where a photographer guy is in the Amazon on some spider-finding expedition or something and he goes to sleep in his tent that is on the ground. Where spiders live. And obviously a spider crawls into his tent and then crawls into his sleeping bag and bites him on the foot and then they find him in the morning and he’s all rotten and dead and claw-hand-y.” She grimaced the whole time she described the dead photographer.
“Because Oreo-sized monsters are apparently enough to terrorize a town in movies,” Faisal said, rolling his eyes.
“But, anyway, I still sleep with my blankets wrapped under my feet. It’s not even a conscious thing anymore; I don’t wrap myself up specifically to keep spiders from biting my ankles and killing me in my sleep, but it’s the underlying cause. It was a means to an end, and fuck that; I want the control back. I want to manage my monsters. That would be my superpower.”
Before I had a chance to answer—to tell them that if I could have any power in the world, it would be to not have a superpower, to be more than the unkillable aftermath, more than a walking reminder, and more than a machine that couldn’t be turned off—we saw it.
Faisal slowed down and craned his neck to look at the shape a little less than half a lamp’s length away. “Uh-oh,” he said, walking up ahead of us to the broken, spiky shape on the side of the road. “It’s our porcupine.”
We caught up to him and Matty squatted down, resting her hands on her massive stomach. “I get that you aren’t supposed to swerve if a deer goes running out. That makes sense—”
“Especially with a busload of kids,” Michael added.
“Right. That makes sense. But this little guy was walking down the road—which was the dumbest thing he ever did—the driver could have gone around him.” She said it quiet.
There was a pink landing strip down the length of the porcupine’s back where the bus had shaved its quills off and a thick dusting of snow on the rest of its spikes that made it almost indistinguishable from the white bank next to it. Michael tromped into the tree line and pulled out a thin branch.
“What are you doing?” Matty asked.
“Rolling him into the woods.” He finished his beer, belched, and handed the can to Faisal. He positioned the stick under the animal like a lever. “Porcupines are nature’s tire shredders. Like how banana peels are nature’s oil sl—”
The animal kicked its broken, pathetic leg at the stick pushing into its side. Matty jolted and fell onto her butt.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” Michael said, grabbing onto Matty’s coat and sliding her over to Faisal, who had his own hands pulled up and away from the animal.
It didn’t hiss or try to crawl away or do much of anything else.
The wind picked up and weaved between us and the not-dead animal, whisking away all the words that none of us said. We stared at it.
“Fuck,” Michael said once more, more consonant and glottal stop than fleshed-out word. “What do we do?” he finally asked.
No one said anything.
“I can’t believe it’s still alive,” Faisal said. “It got hit by a bus full of baby fat and luggage. Jesus Christ.”
“Can we fix him?” Matty asked. It had started to snow again and she was still sitting on the ground.
“If he hasn’t moved, it’s his back. His back is broken,” I said.
“So: can we fix him?” she asked again.
“No,” I said. Not without gleaming doctors and EKG tones that refused to monotone.
She stood up and pulled her hat off. “Then we have to put him out of his misery.”
Michael groaned. “Why did you have to walk down the road! What were you thinking?” he asked the porcupine, like he expected it to answer.
“He’s been out here for almost two days,” Faisal said. “I thought for sure he was dead.”
“Mike, I need you to find a big rock, okay? Can you do that for me? Or a big, big log,” she said.
He kept looking at us, one at a time. “Do we have to?”
“Yeah, we do,” she said.
He nodded and went looking for something heavy or something sharp. Faisal went stomping after him. They disappeared into the gloom beyond the moonlight.
Matty went over to the broken animal and whispered something to it. She petted its nose and stroked its quills, going with the grain and breezing her fingers through the sharp points. The animal’s eyes were glassy and far away but it managed to sniff at her hand.
“My dad had to do this years and years ago,” she said with her back to me. “Same kind of thing. He hit a possum and pretty much tore it in half.”
I crouched next to her and let the animal sniff me. It stopped paying her any attention and tried to lick my hand.
“He likes you.”
The darkness felt too complete, like it had swallowed Michael and Faisal and was just waiting for us to wander in after them. I couldn’t feel the snowflakes falling around us.
“Anyway. He got out of his car and realized he had to finish the thing off, even though he didn’t want to and never asked for it, you know? But he didn’t have his tools with him or his gun because he was just going to pick up lunch. Basically, all he had was a shovel in his trunk.”
I cleared my throat. “Does Michael know this story?”
“Oh, he knows it. Dad likes to tell this one. Turns out, possums are really hard to kill. And every few minutes when a car would go by he’d have to stop and pretend he was just shoveling some roadkill out of the way because he didn’t want the people driving by and seeing some lunatic going nuts on a possum with a shovel.” She let out a humorless little laugh. “It’s funnier when he tells it. Or it was, anyway, before I met this little guy.”
“Sounds like your dad has a lot of stories.” It sounded like her dad would fit right in at any of my family reunions.
“He does.” She kept stroking the porcupine’s nose. “He tells them all the time. It’s how he deals with things, I think.”
Michael and Faisal clawed their way out of the woods. Michael was out of breath, like he’d gone jogging around looking for the right tool. Faisal had an armful of small-to medium-sized sticks, and said, “We couldn’t find any big sticks or rocks. It’s all pines in there.”
“Okay. That’s okay,” Matty said. She unzipped her coat and pulled the pregnancy pouch open before fishing around and pulling her keys out. On the ring, surrounded by bronze- and silver-colored keys, between the drugstore scan card and the tiny flashlight, there was a small Swiss Army knife.
The blade was only two or so inches long.
“Moses, hold his head back.” When I hesitated, she looked me in the eyes and said, “If you can’t do it, it’s okay.”
The drums in my chest were pounding.
I let his nose follow my fingers up until his throat was fully exposed becau
se I was exhausted from seeing Charlie in everything. She kept the porcupine’s chin up with the pinky on her left hand and went up on her elbows, pushing her weight into her hands and flicking the small blade. The porcupine clawed distantly at her sleeve. After a final push, she leaned back and brushed her hand through the animal’s quills until it went slack and stopped pawing at nothing.
She took a deep breath and wiped the hair out of her face with the heel of her hand. “You can move him off the road now.”
TWENTY-EIGHT: CHOICES
AFTER WE’D PASSED A TINY bottle of hand sanitizer around, Matty had insisted that we all have another beer since we were drinking her baby weight away. No one argued; no one said anything for lamps and lamps. The moonlight filled the pines around us and it was bright enough to see our breath.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Faisal eventually asked.
“I’m all right,” Michael said, sounding more legitimately upset than I’d expected him to.
Faisal looked at him but Michael was staring into his beer. Faisal cleared his throat. “Right. Matty, do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m okay,” she said. There was a sad, distant smile on her lips that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “It happens. And we did the best we could. Sometimes you can’t save them. I just hate it.”
I fumbled with my coat, trying to work the zipper down without taking my gloves off. I expected to open my coat and see flames pour out of me between the black and white lines of my referee shirt. It was adrenaline. It was beer. It was the glowing coals and the melting gods. I pulled my hat off.
My gloves were sticky. I couldn’t see anything against the black fabric but it had to be blood. I turned my hand around and tried to find red, but it was invisible on the black gloves in the primal dark. Some engine inside of me started working harder, pumping my heart at more beats per minute and making my stomach vibrate and churn. There was no good way of getting the terrible gloves off. If I pulled one off with the other it meant getting the sticky blood on my skin where it would stain my wrists and work its way up my arms and eventually cover every inch of me and everyone would know that I was covered in blood that would never wash off. The other option was pulling the gloves off with my teeth. Pulling the gloves off with my teeth and getting the blood in my mouth until it drowned me or until it transfused all of my blood. The engine deep inside me that made my heart beat faster started making my breaths come out on hobbled legs and clipped wings.
“Gotta pee. Hang on,” I said. I clamored into the woods, deep enough that they couldn’t see me, and dropped. I had to get the fucking gloves off. I looked for a branch or a stick or some leaves, anything I could use to pry the bloody gloves off, but they’d been right: it was just pine needles. My breath was matching my heart and my mouth was dry and the gloves were wet and I finally stepped on my gloves and pulled my hands out. They were red from being dragged under my boots but I couldn’t see any blood. Until the fingerprints. There were traces of blood around the pads of my fingers.
“Matty, can you throw the hand sanitizer in here?” I said, and then threw up.
* * *
When I came out they were hunkered down on the other side of the road by an old and battered wooden fence tangled in barbed wire. They were sitting with their backs to it, drinking beer and eating snacks out of Matty’s stomach. Past the fence and past the thin line of trees, there was a field that was all frozen mud and splotches of tall, dead grass moving lazily in the night breeze. At the far end of the field, lit by the crisp moonlight bouncing off the fresh snow, there was a busted-up barn with its roof blown mostly off.22
The way the moonlight came through the trees, the three of them were in a clean ray of light, separate and divided from the other shadows.
“Better?” Matty asked me.
“Much. Thanks,” I said, holding up the bottle of sanitizer and tossing it to her. Behind the pines, I’d counted until I felt my chest stop shaking.
“Okay,” Michael said to me. “This is the tricky part.”
Fifty yards away from the broken-down barn there was a single-story home with a bank of windows emanating soft yellow light. One of the darker windows was lit by the colored, flashing light of a television.
“Farmer Browning,” Faisal said, the way you say the name of your oldest adversary.
“Browning because he’s got a shotgun,” Matty said.
“Are you kidding me?”
“He shot at me last year,” Michael said.
“He shot at you? With his shotgun?”
“Right. Last year.”
“And we’re back at the same farm?” I said, not trying to hide my disbelief.
“He’s old. We weren’t sure he’d still be alive.”
“And,” Faisal added, “to be fair, Mike touched his horse.”
“I didn’t touch his horse.”
“Why would you touch his horse?” I said.
“You didn’t even buy it dinner it first. You didn’t even bring it a salt block,” Faisal said.
Michael directed his attention at me. “Obviously that was before we knew about the shotgun.”
“And,” Matty said, “since he’s a thousand years old, he can’t really shoot all that well. Especially at night.”
“None of you are making this sound any better.”
“You’ve got that look in your eye,” Faisal said to me.
“Which look?”
“The ‘Why don’t we just go around the guy with the shotgun’s house’ look. We’ve all had the look.”
“It’s a reasonable look,” Matty said.
“The road we need is right through his property. Right on the other side. You can’t see it because of the trees, but his house is on a little land bridge that cuts through the marsh back there. It would be an extra mile or two to take the road around the property since it’s swamp that way,” Michael said, pointing, “and it’s all lake, that way,” he said, pointing the other way. He looked at me to see if the answer had worked. “He’s still got the look in his eye.”
Matty smiled. “Because it’s important. He called us animals the first time we snuck across his property, a couple years back.”
“Animals?”
“Animals. And I don’t know how to describe it, but you could tell he meant it. It was a bad fucking word for him, you could tell.”
“And this was before Mike touched the horse’s bathing suit area,” Faisal chimed in.
“I don’t molest horses,” he said, like someone trying to talk their way out of a speeding ticket.
“But so now it’s important. We do it to know that we can and to prove that there’s nothing wrong with being an animal. Especially if being an animal means smoking weed and loving your friends and not arbitrarily calling someone ‘Coach.’”
“It’s reclamation,” Faisal said. “If we’re animals, we’re going to show him why he should be jealous.”
“Plus, look,” Michael said. “He’s watching TV—I don’t think he’s going to bother getting out of bed to murder a bunch of kids.”
“He would be in his legal right though,” Faisal said.
“More of a legal gray area, probably,” Matty said.
“Fuck though,” Michael said, pulling his hat off and scratching the back of his head. “I don’t feel like dealing with that asshole tonight. Not after we mercy-killed a porcupine.”
Faisal made a “pfft” noise and mumbled, “We.”
“Moral support,” Michael said, pointing at himself. “And also Weapon Getter.”
“Failed Weapon Getter,” Faisal said, also pointing at him.
“What do you think, Moses?” Matty said. She didn’t have the same energy and color about her that she’d had when we left, but her eyes were still bright.
“I don’t mind walking around,” I said. Most of me just wanted to keep the walk going—to keep hanging out and laughing—and that part really didn’t mind walking the extra distance. The Charlie part of me, though, was sh
aking his head and calling me a coward. The Charlie part of me saw a missed opportunity for adventure.
As we skirted the farmer’s property, the lights came on one at a time. Almost immediately we saw someone appear in the big rectangle of the farmer’s living room, staring out at us, followed by faraway barks.
He was watching us and his dog knew that we were out there. Even though we couldn’t see features, the figure and his dog stayed in that window and watched us until we were out of sight.
TWENTY-NINE: DOGFIGHTER
WE’RE WALKING INTO TOWN, which is only a mile or so away, and it’s the kind of long summer afternoon that goes on forever because we’re twelve and only ever worry about everything and nothing at the same time. My Superman shirt is still baggy on me, but at least it doesn’t cover my knees anymore.
“Yeah, but the tunnel would lead to the fort,” Charlie says.
“The fort should be in the tree though,” I say. I don’t have to tell him which tree I’m talking about. Three houses up, there’s a big dog asleep on the front lawn.
“A tree fort with a tunnel system.”
Neither one of us looks at the palm-down-palm-up high five but it gets the dog’s attention, making it raise its head up and twitch its ears.
“We could put lights in the tunnel. Like, string lights through it. And a sound system,” I say.
“And snakes. Gotta buy some snakes.”
“Snakes?”
“To keep intruders out.”
“I’ll see if we can buy snakes online.” The dog doesn’t take its eyes off of us and as we get in front of its house, it scrabbles to its feet and starts growling. “I wonder if a dog could live in the tunnel,” I ask him.
“We should find out,” he says, and I hear the volume rising in his voice midway though the sentence and I’m aware of the increasing upswing of laughter on the words and I even feel his arms brace against my shoulders, but I still don’t realize that he’s about to push me toward the dog that is easily three-quarters as big as me.
I hear three things as I catch myself, hands braced out and eyes to the ground:
Charlie laughing.
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