The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

by Jeffrey Rotter

  The tide had run out, and on either side of the road the mudflats gasped and gurgled. Crabs swayed their pincers at their doorsteps. The smell of fish rot and reed blew across the road. Everything stank of death, everything but Umma.

  “Pop,” I said. “You can’t just take her. Terry said he won’t allow it.” I looked to Faron for backup. We had to pull together.

  My father did not respond. Faron did. “You talk like Umma sometimes,” he told me. “The old man can do as he likes.”

  An oak had broken through the surface of the causeway, spreading shade over the blacktop. Pop leaned the body against the tree and looked past us to the launch tower. Faron shoved me hard and I tripped over a root. “If it wasn’t for you,” he said, “Umma would have never signed those papers.”

  I asked what he meant, and I regret to say he told me. “She knew you were soft. You never were bully enough for the Gables, let alone any Cuba Pens. She only signed to save you from prison, and now look.”

  I did. A puddle was forming around the corpse. Umma steamed in the rising heat. The shroud softened to reveal her features, a delicate shoulder, a deerlike calf, an ear. “I didn’t kill nobody,” I screamed, but my voice sounded like it had in the pit, stifled and stuck inside my own head.

  Pop studied his arms, blue from the inert burden he had carried across the cape. He flexed them carefully. I wanted to tell Faron he was the one to blame. He was the one hijacked a tour bus. Pop was guilty, too. Who kills a man over a jug of rum?

  It was not my softness that had brought our family down; it was ill temper.

  We soft ones only absorb the blows. After some fool flies into the Night Glass, we are the ones who stick around to suffer their absence. For men like Pop and Faron, the pain of life is profound but brief. Mine is like that Melville Island sunset, sorrowful and so long.

  But I didn’t say any of that. I was hurt, so that’s what I told him. Hadn’t Faron just apologized, wept on my neck? “But you just said you were sorry.”

  He looked at me as if I was stupid. “For Sylvia, idiot.”

  I didn’t understand. He clarified: “Me and Sylvia,” Faron said. “It’s me and Sylvia, not you. Not you and anybody.”

  While we were fighting, Pop picked up the body again and left the shade of the tree to jump the retaining wall. He stepped into the marsh and started walking. I said we should go get him, but Faron told me Pop could take Umma wherever he wanted, walk out to sea if he wanted. Drown with her if he wanted. “A man and a woman are meant to stay together. Pop won’t be nothing without Umma.”

  I did not see it that way, and if I stayed on the road with Faron I might have hit him, which would have ended poorly for me. I followed Pop into the marsh, but it was hard going in dress shoes. The mud wanted my brogans, so I left them behind to collect later. Barefoot was no good either. Under the pluff lay a minefield of oyster shells. I stepped carefully over the debris of a wrecked car. A bumper, hubcaps, a booster seat with a bloated dolly inside, they made a floating bridge.

  Pop had already gone far ahead, showing no hesitation whatever. Even shin-deep in the muck and carrying Umma, he appeared to pick up speed. I turned back when a beer can cut my toe. Pop sat down in the water and started digging with his hands.

  Faron removed his shoes and hurled them across the marsh. Pop picked up a brogan and examined it, like he had never before held such a marvelous and wretched object. Then he stuck Faron’s shoe in the hole and looked back at his sons.

  “I only want to sit with her a while,” he shouted. “I only need—” But he didn’t finish saying what it was he needed.

  I said we should give Pop some privacy, although that was a joke, as crowded as he was by mosquitoes and fiddler crabs. He would come back, I said, when he was done. Faron only wished he had more shoes to throw at him. We watched Pop peel back the bedsheet and press his head to my mother’s cold face, and then I dragged Faron back down the causeway.

  * * *

  Pop stayed out on the marsh until late afternoon. When he returned to lay the body across the picnic table, he looked worse than Umma. His legs were white with dry mud. Welts covered his face and arms. They must have been a miserable torment, but Pop refused to scratch, like he was doing a penance.

  Terry located the keys to the front loader, but after a promising start it sputtered out well short of the creek where we intended to dig her grave. We couldn’t leave Umma out to be torn up by turkey vultures. A mother requires proper disposal. So Mae arranged a stack of busted pallets in the Launch Control parking lot, and Bill set the pyre ablaze with a Bic and a can of lavatory disinfectant. While Umma’s body snapped and dissolved in smoke, we passed around the Haven Dark and listened to Bill rattle off clichés.

  When no one seemed to appreciate his eulogizing, he tried to make a joke. “Little hot for a bonfire,” he said.

  The effect was to remind me of the fires along the Dixie Hiway, how Umma reeked of wood smoke when she returned from the clinic to our Gables apartment. Her body, ablaze on the pallets, gave off a different sort of heat than any bonfire, like a radiant form of anger that made my skin crisp up into a shell. I understood what it felt like to be Pop, to hate so thoroughly and know the hatred would not pass until someone paid.

  One flesh cooks like any other and smells much the same. Mother or rabbit. Loved one or dinner. I pressed a rag to my nose and begged the wind to shift. Mercifully it did, and then the breeze stiffened till sparks danced into the woods. We heard the first drops of rain sizzle on the hot asphalt. The fire flared up, then dimmed, as a storm raked across the cape, almost cold after the day’s heat. Umma smoldered, steamed. Blue smoke spread low and thick to erase the mourners from sight.

  I shouted to Pop. What do we do now? We can’t just leave Umma here, half done. It wouldn’t be right. Bill was quick to answer: we needed to get the body in the ground. The gators would come for her overnight, the rats. Pop stepped into the hissing coals and lifted her up. Together we followed him past the trailers to the creek in a soggy processional.

  The men stripped off their coveralls and dug a shallow grave in the sandy bank. The saturated ground made for easier digging, but it took some effort to chop through the mangrove roots. While we dug, Mae and Sylvia wrapped the burnt remains of Umma’s body in a fresh bedsheet and sealed her again inside the water barrel. When we were done, me and Faron covered the mound with palmetto fronds. Lacking a marker, Pop stuck his brogans upright at one end. Spaced as they were, the shoes looked as if they belonged to Umma, lying just below the surface, with her toes pointed at the sky.

  The rain passed as quick as it had come on. We sat around the picnic table not saying much of consequence. It was a wake and we knew the rules. After Bill and Mae went to bed, Faron made Pop promise to try sleeping as well. Then it was just the three of us. I watched my brother’s knees press against Sylvia’s on the bench and wanted to drive myself between them, disgrace myself, weep, scream her name. I confess that I wanted to hurt them both, somehow. Not physically; I loved her too much to do that.

  Faron grinned at her, at me, as if there was a tacit agreement that all was well among us, that I had somehow accepted Sylvia’s choice. Mother’s suicide should have made Faron’s betrayal look petty by comparison; but if anything, one loss amplified the other.

  I knew I should go inside, leave my brother to Sylvia’s consolations, her knees. But I couldn’t stand the thought of what they would get up to in my absence.

  Terry had offered to go easy on us the following day. As the hour of our departure crept closer, I believe the man was going soft. Or perhaps he was afraid of what Pop might do to him. Either way, it meant we could sleep in the next morning. “May as well get wasted,” said Sylvia.

  Bill had taken the jug inside his trailer, presumably to keep Pop sober. If Sylvia went in after it, she might never come back. Faron told me to get it. I eased open the door and looked around the dim kitchenette. A little light came through the café curtains. I could see the jug on t
he table and Bill Reade sitting behind it.

  “Looking for something?” His eyes were huge and uncaring. He despised me; I meant nothing. He smiled.

  “You know, your father is going to scuttle this whole damn mission,” he said. That he had come to regard Terry’s trap a mission spoke to Bill’s impenetrable pride. A Reade would never be a conscript.

  I said I didn’t know anything about that. “I just came for the rum.” He slid it across the table and nodded.

  “I know men like your father,” he said. “Somebody always has to pay, even if justice can’t do shit to make things even.”

  I think I asked to borrow some glasses.

  “Your pa will punish Terry Nguyen for letting your mother do what she would have done anyway,” he said. “Then they will kill your pa and send the lot of us down to the Cuba Pens.”

  “Terry would never. He needs us to fly the rocket.”

  “Let’s just say this team, we aren’t working out. Nguyen was smart enough to enlist replacements. He’s been careful to hide them, but I don’t miss much. They’re an even uglier bunch than we are.”

  Bill told me he intended to go to Europa, no matter what. He would never submit to prison. His only girl would not remain on any planet with Faron Van Zandt. Bill Reade would gladly dash his family against the Night Glass before he let either of those things happen.

  “Boy, you need to sit,” he said. Terry had put Bill through the whole protocol at Launch Control. He knew how to key in the liftoff code; he knew how to fly the Orion, how to land it. Nguyen had been careless to put so much knowledge in one man’s head.

  “Plug and play,” said Bill, like it was sex talk between little boys. “Here’s what’s going to happen: I will teach you what I know. In three weeks, you are going to sit up there in Launch Control and help us take off in that rocket: me and Mae and Sylvia.”

  He stood and poked around under the loft mattress. “Now I know I said you were too dense; I spoke rashly and I beg your forgiveness. Hell, even a Vocationals boy could launch that thing.” I recognized the duffel bag he laid on the table. “Question is, do you know how to operate one of these?” He unzipped the bag and showed me the Bushmaster rifle.

  “What if I tell?”

  “Boy, I don’t have to threaten you, but if it makes it easier I will.” He parted the curtain. Faron and Sylvia sat side by side on the picnic table, tangling their ankles. “I will murder that brat brother of yours. That’s what.”

  “And what happens to the rest of us?”

  “Tell me, Little Brother—do you really want to go up there? It’ll be eight years inside that Gunt coffin. You couldn’t even stomach a few hours in the Penguin.”

  It was true what he said, I did not need threats; anyone could see how afraid I was. If Bill wanted Europa all to himself and his lousy family, I was willing to help.

  Mae emerged from the master bedroom wearing a violet negligee. Bill told her he had everything under control, but she didn’t leave.

  “Me and Mae have stolen birds before,” he said, taking three glasses from the cabinet above the stove and handing them to me. “I don’t see how this will be any different.”

  11.

  Dr. Padma Ridley taught us three rules of motion put down by a curly-wig man called Newton. Mostly you would have to be thickheaded not to have figured them out for yourself. If you push something, it will go until another thing gets in the way. If you want to move a heavy load, give it a good shove.

  But there are moral mechanics to which old Newton’s laws don’t apply. It takes no effort at all to get a terrible sadness off the ground. Speak a few words and everyone you love will be sent away. Sign a paper and your mother dies. Tap a few digits on a keyboard and you are left lonely on the ground watching everything you care for rise up in the sky, never to come down.

  I did as Bill said. He gave me no choice. Plus Faron had stolen my girl and I was petrified of eight years on the Orion. I became that man’s pupil and learned how to light a fire under Terry Nguyen’s rocket. When the day came, I broke into Launch Control before dawn armed with a Bushmaster rifle that I could not use. I sat down and with the slightest pressure of my fingertips stirred that great howling machine to scale the clouds and vanish. Up it roared. It hissed and departed this earth, scorching the launchpad black and subtracting from my life a great measure of love.

  Newton’s third law says every force has its twin, equal in intensity but headed the other way. When I pushed Orion into the sky, it pushed me back. I had to run; Terry and his goons were coming for me, and they always would be. I fled Cape Cannibal and for eight years I ducked and digressed across two continents gaining velocity until this mountain in the Chilly wastelands, high among the stars, stood in my way.

  It causes me no pleasure to recount the details of my flight from Cannibal after the launch. Your father did not distinguish himself on the road. I lost teeth. I disappointed people and animals, but the end was recompense enough for so shameful a journey, because this is how I came to find you, Little Sylvia.

  * * *

  It was a damp, hot early morning in late May when I took off running. As one sun stood upon the ocean, a second rose behind me on the Cape, a fire I had started and now had to outpace. I crawled through creek and mangrove until the ocean appeared all broad and bright. A promising vision, the world was big enough for anyone to hide in. This, of course, was an illusion. I had places to go but no clue where to begin, so I sat on the dune and thought it was time to start crying. The sound of a Vanster engine brought me to my feet. Terry was coming; he always would be; if I didn’t run, he would break me where I sat or send me down to Cuba to be with Pop.

  Alongside the beach I found a road so chewed up by hurrycanes I was compelled to follow a trail of asphalt crumbs. They led me north to the crossroads of a damaged hiway, where I lay behind the sawgrass till night came and ran again.

  My immediate destination was a Bosom Industries town on the far side of the lagoon. When I got there I found the off-ramp mobbed with jellyfishers, money lovers, and bums. The rocket fire was bright enough to see from miles away, and it drew a crowd across the water. I resented them for their inconsequential lives. They could drift as they pleased, from a motel bed, boat, or park bench, to loiter on an off-ramp, to smoke and boast about what a show they had seen in the sky that morning. I stood among those peasants and hated them because they owed one another nothing and had never given away what they loved.

  They drew figures on the Night Glass with their greasy fingers, laughed and shouted to be heard, wagged their beards, and spat into the grass. “Backward comet,” one fool kept repeating, like this was an established thing. His hands were taut with jelly stings. His buddy, drunk, reckoned it was a volcano; another man said cruise ship explosion. Some whore told me she’d seen a fireball burst against a cloud. She held my face, insisted. They were all wrong, of course, but I was in no position to set them straight. I needed to keep running.

  If I could reach the Consolidated towns out west I’d be safe from Terry Nguyen. I did not know how vindictive that man could be; I knew only that I had done his project irreparable harm and that he owned a van.

  Moving north, I slipped through a tan-brick subdivision that hugged the shore till I reached the head of the lagoon. A grassy point jutted into the water and on it a low adobe glowed with candlelight and pretaped choir music. I drew close to the courtyard and knelt by the gate to get a look inside. Tall tables, tall stemware, tall people. Everybody wore matching pajamas and talked with their teeth showing. Umma taught us boys to speak with our lips drawn down to save ourselves the embarrassment.

  I was not so unworldly that I didn’t recognize a spa when I saw one. I knew what it was this place trafficked in: nothing. Patrons paid to wait for nothing. They practiced nothing with their bodies. They pretended to sleep, which explained the pajamas. I thought: I could hide here; these were my sort of people; I had nothing either and could expect the same in the foreseeable future.
Only this brand of nothing costs money, and I had nothing to pay with but two baked yams in my backpack.

  Had it been Faron, he would not have hesitated at the gate. He would have bluffed his way and bullied himself right on inside. He would have hidden in a steam room till he had cooked up a plan. But I was tired and I was me. I pressed my face between the bars and shut my eyes. I heard boot heels approach over the small-bore gravel of the courtyard; the man who wore them sounded heavy and hurried. I opened my eyes to see that he was not the sort of man who wore pajamas. He wore a yellow blazer jacket and carried a pistol on his hip.

  At his urging I moved along, north or maybe it was east, too scared to keep to a straight line. Finally I sat on a beach, just above the waves in a wind stiff enough to chase off the mosquitoes. Strapped to the side of my pack was a pup tent I had taken from the bed of the pickup down in the pit, but I didn’t have the strength to pitch it, so I lay on the sand and asked the beach to swallow me whole. An old man wells up and blinks, never letting his tears fall, as if reserving them will keep him going. But I was still a boy and fully capable of weeping. Where my tears spilled on the sand I imagined a great sinkhole forming, like the one that exposed the Orion. I would fall in. I would plunge forever. I would go under alone as we all must at the end.

  If the sand didn’t want me, maybe sleep did. I shut my eyes and tried to recall how I had done it the night before, every night before, the trick of sleep. Smart Man Tolemy understood that it was cotton; we soak it with the ink of our troubled thoughts. But sleep can only absorb so much worry. That first night after the launch, I lay awake reciting the names of the animals hunted to extinction in Zoo Miamy: great big kitties painted with flames, a pony in prison stripes, a fake man in a fringe jacket. They called him the Orange Tan.

  * * *

  I woke in a rising surf. Foam tickled my nose, a dissolute odor that reminded me to be afraid. Up I jumped and continued at a jog along the coast. It was hard going in the sand, and I did not travel light. The Jansport pounded my rump, its straps clawed at my burnt shoulders. In addition to the yams and pup tent I carried a few paper books, a toothbrush, Pop’s wallet, and Umma’s canvas bundle. She had been charitable enough to leave three fat envelopes of fink rock.